Ind vs Ban: The Cricket Match That Became a Global Power Play
The Super-Subcontinent Derby: How India vs Bangladesh Quietly Became the World’s Most Watched Proxy War
by Our Man with a Visa Stamp and a Liver to Match
When 1.7 billion people glance at their phones this evening, roughly the same number who claim they’ve “read the terms and conditions,” they will discover that a patch of grass in Hyderabad matters more than the UN Security Council’s afternoon agenda. India versus Bangladesh—cricket’s version of a family squabble at a wedding buffet—has metastasized into a global Rorschach test. What you see in it says less about yorkers and dew factors than about which kind of existential dread you packed for the day.
For the uninitiated, the fixture looks lopsided: one country possesses nuclear weapons, the other possesses nuclear levels of determination. Yet the ledger is closer than IMF spreadsheets suggest. Bangladesh has beaten India in three of their last five white-ball meetings, a statistic that causes New Delhi television anchors to clutch their pearls so hard Mikimoto files a restraining order. Meanwhile in Dhaka, every victory is celebrated as proof that 1971 was merely the trailer and this, right here, is the director’s cut.
But why should anyone beyond the subcontinent care? Because the match is a convenient stage for the larger farce we call globalization. Chinese phone brands sponsor both dressing rooms, South Korean LED hoardings blink at both dugouts, and an Australian analytics firm sells heat maps to both analysts—heat maps presumably generated by unpaid interns sweating through the algorithmic night. The only local element left is the crowd, and even they are live-tweeting in California while queuing for dosa at Sunnyvale food trucks.
Viewed from Brussels, the contest is an allegory for every asymmetrical negotiation in town. India is the customs union with the bigger GDP—loud, impatient, convinced history owes it a favor. Bangladesh is the plucky applicant state clutching a PowerPoint on “Why My Garment Sector Deserves GSP+.” When Shakib Al Hasan unfurls that inside-out cover drive, a thousand EU trade delegates watching on mute suddenly understand what “rules-based order” actually means: somebody else’s rules, your order of naan.
Washington, for its part, monitors the game through a geopolitical kaleidoscope. Pentagon interns have been instructed to log every time Virat Kohli checks his smartwatch, on the off chance it synchronizes with satellite movements over the Bay of Bengal. Foggy Bottom analysts meanwhile rehearse talking points about “Indo-Pacific partnerships,” which is State-Department-ese for “please don’t buy Russian oil during the drinks break.” Should the match go down to the last over, expect a bipartisan Senate resolution congratulating whichever board president’s lobby firm paid for dinner last month.
And then there is the money. Broadcast rights for this particular skirmish have been bundled into a Murdoch-Reliance-Disney stew so Byzantine that even the accountants need an accountant. Advertising slots cost more per second than the annual budget of three Pacific island nations—nations, incidentally, that will be underwater before the next World Cup thanks to carbon emissions partly generated by powering this very spectacle. Somewhere in the metaverse, a non-fungible Kohli pull-shot just sold for 47 ether, which could also buy you a kidney in most jurisdictions.
Yet amid the spectacle, a sliver of realpolitik persists. Both countries share the same poisoned air, the same rising seas, the same WhatsApp university spreading identical vaccine hoaxes. Cricket cannot fix any of that, but it does offer the illusion that 22 players on a rectangle of chemically enhanced Bermuda grass might, for three hours, make the world’s problems rhyme. Spoiler: they won’t. But the illusion is lucrative, and in 2024 that is the closest we get to foreign policy.
So when the final ball is bowled and the winning captain thanks “the boys for sticking to the process,” remember that the process involves tax shelters, ghost-follower analytics, and a carbon footprint visible from the International Space Station. Still, the fireworks will be pretty, and for one night we can all pretend the scoreboard tallies more than just runs.
Which, come to think of it, is exactly how the rest of the planet keeps score on everything else.
