Growing up, you see both the Indian and the Pakistani cricket team falter year after year, world cup after world cup (except the T20) against quality world teams. Filled with a plethora of legends, India and Pakistan together have over the years won two ODI world cups, two T20 world cups, and have won (Tests+ODIs+T20s) 983 out of 2290 matches.
I often wondered how would a combined team of India and Pakistan look like, and what would be its impact.
Lets look at the traditional good, bad and ugly of both teams:
India has produced great spinners and Indian batsmen are quality players of spin. Pakistani bowling legends are master medium and fast bowlers with lethal aces up their sleeves.
Indian openers have been devastating, a host of records in the batting domain belong to Indian openers. Pakistan has a much better quality of middle order and lower middle order players.
Both take a hit on the wicket keeper position.
Now, this thought has been in my mind since the past 10 years, and hence below is the team that first came in my mind during my early adolescent life.
Indo-Pak XI:
Sachin Tendulkar
Shahid Afridi/Saaed Anwar
Rahul Dravid
Inzamam-ul-Haq
Yousuf Yohanna (back then, this was his name)/ Yuvraj Singh
Abdur Razzaq
Moin Khan (wk)
Anil Kumble
Wasim Akram (captain)
Shoaib Akhtar
Waqar Younis/ Harbhajan Singh
The above team has the most awesome combination of openers, middle order, lower middle order, spinners and pacers.
This dream of mine has so far remained a dream. I hope that in the future, such friendly contests will be undertaken to show the world and show the people in the two countries that together, the India-Pakistan combination is one of the deadliest, not just in sports, but in also in geo-politics.
I hope to see many share the same dream and view.
Your observation is good in theory but i do not think it can materialize. The split is far too stretched and the wound way to deep :(
ReplyDeleteI did rather support a mediocre Indian team rather than a Indo-Pak team
No wound is too deep for time to heal. i am pretty sure(rather hopeful) that the next generation or the one after that will have pleasant relations.
ReplyDeletei think i miss wasim, waqar, imran the most - i still see waqar n wasim videos :)
ReplyDeletethe above is the late 90s team of Indo-Pak
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, some 5hrs after this post, thr was a similar post on cricinfo looking at an Indo-Pak XI for the 80s....here is the link:
http://www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/458023.html