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Michael Atherton urges ICC to make tournament draws transparent, questioning repeated India-Pakistan matches driven by economic and political motives after Asia Cup controversies.
India beat Pakistan to win Asia Cup 2025 (PTI Photo)
Former England captain Michael Atherton has asked the International Cricket Council (ICC) to bring more transparency to its tournament draw system, even if it means fewer India-Pakistan matches. He believes that the sport has slyly and deliberately oriented itself to arrange more games between the rivals in international tournaments for commercial reasons, but it’s no longer ‘justified’ after the debacles in the 2025 Asia Cup.
There were several controversies at the men’s Asian tournament, with thinly veiled political statements in abundance, all in light of the Pahalgam terror attack and the border scuffles between the countries. The two teams were backed by their boards, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) and the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB), with both organisations certainly carrying political baggage.
“Despite its scarcity (maybe, in part, because of its scarcity) it is a fixture that carries huge economic clout, one of the main reasons why the broadcast rights for ICC tournaments are worth so much — roughly $3 billion for the most recent rights cycle (in) 2023-27,” Atherton wrote in his column for The Times newspaper. “Due to the relative decline in the value of bilateral matches, ICC events have grown in frequency and importance, and so the India and Pakistan fixture is crucial to the balance sheets of those who would not otherwise have any skin in the game.”
It’s been ages since India and Pakistan were not in the same group at an ICC event. Unlike other sports and sporting tournaments, the ICC rarely explains how it picks the groups.
It’s considered an open secret that the World Body makes sure the two teams are in the same group so as to have at least one India-Pakistan match in every tournament, with chances of a second in the semi-final/final. The Asia Cup takes it to extremes, with a format and groups arranged to get three of these matches in less than a month — which is what materialised in the latest edition.
For the Asian Cricket Council (ACC), the revenues earned from these games are crucial to fund grassroots cricket in the region, making the issue quite complicated.
“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. 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,” Atherton added.
October 05, 2025, 23:54 IST
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