An ugly Asia Cup rivalry showed how politics now eclipses the cricket it feeds upon

Ninety minutes passed between Tilak Varma putting the final touches on India's Asia Cup final victory over Pakistan and the start of the post-match presentation - enough time to have played an an entire additional T20 innings. Cricket's shortest format was in its earliest years considered its most frivolous. Now it is its most glamorous, dynamic and accessible "product" - to be shown off at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics as cricket once again attempts to capture America and find fresh audiences. If it is to gain credibility as a truly global sport, there is no better medium.

And yet, last Sunday night, following the pinnacle match in the tournament for teams from the sport's most cricket-obsessed region, there was sufficient petulance to fill half a T20. We know the general outline of events. Suryakumar Yadav's team refused to accept the Asia Cup trophy from Asian Cricket Council president Mohsin Naqvi, who, vitally, is also Pakistan's Minister of the Interior. Naqvi, a controversial politician even within Pakistan, refused to cede the handing over of the trophy to a less-polarising figure.

Suryakumar had indicated his team would not receive the trophy from Naqvi weeks before, so this standoff was entirely predictable. And yet the post-match presentation, which ordinarily would be a joyous event to cap off three tough weeks of competition, was held hostage, for no reason ultimately - no trophy was publicly handed over.

The 48 hours following the final were characterised by a whirl of high-profile reactions, and reactions to reactions, each additional voice broadening and intensifying a vortex of opinion comprised of precious few cricketing facts. India' prime minister, Narendra Modi, posted on X that India's victory was an on-field continuation of Operation Sindoor (the Indian name for the skirmish with Pakistan in May), Suryakumar praised Modi for "batting on the front foot" for India in return, and Naqvi posted indignantly that Modi should not be "dragging war into sport", when only days before, Naqvi himself posted a sports gif that appeared to reference planes being shot down. This was after Haris Rauf, while fielding in an earlier match, had made gestures depicting crashing aircraft, and Sahibzada Farhan had celebrated a half-century by firing his bat like a gun.

That Varma had paced his 69 not out more or less perfectly to raise India up from 20 for 3 gained comparatively little attention. That Faheem Ashraf and Shaheen Afridi's intense new-ball overs had set up one of the most electric passages of play in a tournament too short of cricketing tension went mostly overlooked. When politics wraps its tentacles so tightly around the sport, it cannot be a surprise that a little of cricket's soul is squeezed out.

But politics is only one of two major forces currently pressing upon the game's integrity, the other also plainly evident at the Asia Cup. Suryakumar said at one press conference that "[a] few things in life are ahead of sportsmanship spirit" to explain his team's decision to refuse public handshakes with the Pakistan players. But handshakes or not, these sides played three times, the tournament having been structured specifically to make an India vs Pakistan triple the most likely possibility, to maximise revenue.

Even in global tournaments, it has long been taken as read that India and Pakistan always start in the same group, which perhaps confers a small competitive advantage - those teams are able to plan for a specific opposition long before the schedule is announced. More egregiously, with each of the "big five" Asian teams capable of making a deep run in this tournament, the three others (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka) were again stuffed into a "group of death", the third consecutive Asia Cup in which this has been the case. Pakistan and India, meanwhile, had two Associate sides - Oman and the UAE - to play in Group A.

With two teams from each group having arrived at the Super Four, one side was then required to play on consecutive nights to make the schedule work. A Group B team was, of course, saddled with this fate (Bangladesh in this instance, who rested key players for one of these games). In the previous Asia Cup, which was partially played mid-monsoon in Sri Lanka, only the match between Pakistan and India enjoyed the safety of a reserve day in the Super Four stage.

As the most profitable version of the Asia Cup played out this year - India and Pakistan facing each other at prime time on three consecutive Sundays - the other six teams, who shook every hand put in front of them, who turned up to every press conference they were contractually required to attend, who, committing significant resources, had planned and trained for months for a tournament whose very schedule was an article of disrespect, seemed, for all this, no more than props in the India vs Pakistan melodrama. Competitive equilibrium is a foundational rudiment of any sport, and yet cricket has for some time been prepared to lay it on the altar of capitalism. What was new here are the depths of absurdity plumbed - these teams more or less insisting on playing each other while making a show of resenting having to do so.

The fallout from Dubai will have immediate consequences elsewhere in the cricketing world. In the approach to the ongoing Women's World Cup, Pakistan captain Fatima Sana was visibly uncomfortable when questioned on the political tension that will attend their campaign, particularly when they play India on Sunday in Colombo. Both her side and Harmanpreet Kaur's are now required to formulate a plan on how they interact publicly. Do they take cues from the men and refuse handshakes? Will politicians also regard their match as an extension of military operations? South Asian women athletes anyway function in a far more fraught cultural and political milieu than their male counterparts - gender equality a more distant dream in this region than in some others. Now, in the midst of a World Cup, they have this poison dart flying in their direction.

Most worrying about the game's present direction is that there may be no meaningful shift in the short term. Politically the India-Pakistan relationship - as riven as it has been for decades - shows no signs of easing. And while there is more money in cricket than ever, it is also not about to become any less concentrated in India, which already is a cricketing superpower the likes of which the game has not seen.

There was once edifying collaboration among South Asian cricket boards. Most notably, this was in 1996, when Pakistan, India, and Sri Lanka together co-hosted the World Cup, in the face of criticism from the traditional cricketing powers that the region could not pull such an event off. Ahead of that World Cup, India and Pakistan put a combined team together in Colombo to demonstrate that Sri Lanka was safe for cricket. Wasim Akram and Sachin Tendulkar travelled on the same team bus, strategised as one, wore the same kit, and delighted in the joy they were bringing to a Sri Lankan crowd together. Such a string of events is unthinkable now.

There is no strap of the globe in which cricket is as profound a cultural touchstone as in Asia, nor a region that affords the sport so vast a canvas. In one South Asian afternoon, full tosses could find themselves as easily crashed over freshly harvested paddies in Jaffna as through mango groves in Karnataka, as above the waves in Cox's Bazaar or down a Himalayan hillside. In a single day, a left-arm wristspinner might find themselves ripping a rubber ball in a galli match in the morning, a hard ball at academy nets in the afternoon, a tape ball under lights at night. In eastern Afghanistan in the last year, cricket fans gathered in public spaces to celebrate team victories in defiance of Taliban wishes. It took gun-toting men to scatter them.

Little of this joy was on display in the aftermath of a gripping Asia Cup final. Instead, an already compromised sport was co-opted, and a shared passion became a tool of political division. An even greater cultural chasm has now been cleaved than when the tournament began. Far from exhibiting the best of our sport in the region in which it is most beloved, this Asia Cup spiralled into a showcase of dysfunction.