BCCI responds to call for scrapping India-Pakistan matches

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has rejected the idea of not holding India-Pakistan fixtures in the future, following the Asia Cup 2025 fallout.

According to a report in the Indian news outlet ‘Dainik Jagran’, the BCCI highlighted the need for a clash between arch-rivals, taking into account the broadcasters and sponsors.

“It’s easy to talk about all this, but will sponsors and broadcasters agree to it? In today’s situation, if any major team, not just India, withdraws from a tournament, it will be difficult to attract sponsors,” the report quoted BCCI official.

The comments from the BCCI came after former England captain Michael Atherton and a notable voice in cricket commentary urged the International Cricket Council (ICC) not to have more matches between India and Pakistan.

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“If cricket was once the vehicle for diplomacy, it is now, clearly, a proxy for broader tensions and for propaganda.

There is little justification, in any case, for a serious sport to arrange tournament fixtures to suit its economic needs, and now that the rivalry is being exploited in other ways, there is even less justification for it,” Atherton wrote in his column for The Times.

“For the next broadcast rights cycle, the fixture draw before ICC events should be transparent, and if the two teams do not meet every time, so be it,” he further wrote.

For the unversed, India and Pakistan squared off against each other three times in the recently concluded Asia Cup. However, all matches were surrounded by controversy from the onset.

During the first fixture between the two teams — their first encounter since the May escalation, which had led both neighbours to the verge of full-fledged war — handshakes were avoided by both teams.

Furthermore, the final also saw a delayed presentation ceremony due to the Men in Blue’s refusal to take silverware from Asian Cricket Council (ACC) President and Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) Chairman Mohsin Naqvi.

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