But Test cricket was not the chosen vehicle for the chauvinist melodrama that this new audience craved. For these neophytes Test matches were too long, too infrequent and too often drawn. One-day matches with their guaranteed results offered more opportunities for catharsis and release. The commercial potential of India-Pakistan cricket was first seriously milked by the organisers of the Sharjah circus. The brainchild of a cricket loving sheikh and that canny former captain of Pakistan, Asif Iqbal, it drew expatriate Indians and Pakistanis working in the United Arab Emirates, former cricketers from the subcontinent looking for handouts, bookies, Bollywood stars, Bombay ganglords and vast television audiences in India and Pakistan.
The most traumatic single moment in the history of Indian cricket as registered by its fans, did not occur during some memorable Test match. It was not contained in the great Madras Test of 1998-99 where, despite Tendulkar's heroic century, India fell 12 runs short; nor was it framed by that earlier defeat in Bangalore in 1986-87 at the hands of Imran's men, when Sunil Gavaskar fell in the 90s after a great innings on a vicious turner. No; India's supremely awful moment, seared into every cricket-watching Indian's eyeballs, was the last-ball six hit by Javed Miandad off Chetan Sharma in 1985-86 when Pakistan needed four to win a tournament, indistinguishable from the dozens of series that Sharjah hosted year after year.
It was the repeated defeats in Sharjah that paved the way for India's refusal to play Pakistan. Darkly implying that the dice at Sharjah were loaded in favour of the Pakistanis, India stopped playing there and, as relations declined during the 1990s, cricket tours became rarer, increasingly hostage to reasons of state. Thaws in India-Pakistan diplomacy are accompanied by a resumption of cricket relations whereas frostier periods lead to disengagement. This latest restoration of cricket ties again follows a flurry of conciliatory gestures made by the governments of India and Pakistan in order to persuade the world that the other country is the warmongering aggressor, deaf to the needs of peace.
Over the past 15 years, despite the stop-start course of India-Pakistan cricket, the boards have snuggled up together to act as a south Asian bloc in the changing world of international cricket politics. This bloc has successfully elevated Jagmohan Dalmiya to the presidency of the ICC, it has managed to strong-arm the ICC into staging the World Cup twice in the subcontinent and it has held together despite India's unilateral ban on cricket matches against Pakistan, at home or away. This ban hurts Pakistan's coffers more than it does Indian ones because the Indian board has very deep pockets. But in spite of that the Pakistan board has backed Dalmiya in all his challenges to the authority of the ICC, from the Mike Denness affair to the row about sponsorship contracts on the eve of the last World Cup.
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There are two main reasons for this odd fraternity. One is the perceived tendency of the two founding members of the ICC, England and Australia, to carry on as if the management of world cricket ought to be theirs by right. This by itself is enough to create a kind of post-colonial solidarity. More important is the dawning realisation that the Indian television market makes it the economic powerhouse of the cricket world. Dalmiya put the finances of the ICC on a sound footing by delivering the Indian audience and he is not about to let anyone forget that. It makes perfect economic sense for someone like General Tauqir Zia, head of the Pakistan board, to back India against the ICC. Dalmiya's explicit assurance to all his allies in ICC politics is simple: `Stick with me and I'll make you rich.' In a way that Karl Marx, a materialist himself, would have understood, economics has begun to bring together what the subcontinent's politicians would pull apart. **