India v Pakistan Report Card

Featuring the greatest rivalry in world cricket, philosophical questions and Bumrah's joyous nonsense

The Greatest Rivalry in World Cricket
Grade: C

And so we come to the inevitable India v Pakistan match. The one the entire tournament is seemingly reverse-engineered around. The contest routinely described as the greatest rivalry in world cricket. 

Oh, sure. Australia and England fans may take umbrage with that description, given the almost 150 years of Ashes history. But it’s hard to deny the passion generated by an India-Pakistan contest.

Perhaps the true greatest rivalry in world cricket is the rivalry between whether the greatest rivalry in world cricket is the Ashes or India v Pakistan.

Proposal: a Rivalry World Cup, based solely around matches played between the great rivals of the game. Results would be irrelevant - we’re not measuring that. Instead, pairs of rival teams would progress to the semi-finals and final based on such factors as crowd size, television ratings and numbers of people being truly awful to one another on social media about a sporting contest.

This is how we keep ODIs relevant, people.

(And, obviously, if this works, future generations can move it to the next level - does the Australia-England v India-Pakistan rivalry match up with the New Zealand-South Africa v Sri Lanka-Netherlands rivalry? And so forth.)