All quite cricket

In the past two years I’ve done several posts on sports, focusing on how athletic contests can sometimes (improbably) affect world politics. My top ten list of "foreign policy sporting events" is here, and some readers may recall I was rooting for the "Indo-Pak" express (the men’s doubles team of Rohan Bopanna of India and Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi of Pakistan) at the U.S. Open last year.

We might be seeing a new entrant into the list of sports events that helped shape the foreign policy agenda. India and Pakistan played a semi-final match in the cricket World Cup today, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India invited Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Gilani to watch the match with him. Thus, while over a billion people obsessed about spinners, fast bowlers, fielding miscues, and the bumpiness of the pitch, the two leaders had a chance to exchange some friendly words and establish a bit of personal rapport.

The issues dividing India and Pakistan are deep and enduring, and a cricket match obviously won’t resolve them. Unlike the U.S. and China in the era of ping-pong diplomacy, there aren’t powerful geopolitical forces pushing the two states toward a rapprochement. But it would be highly desirable if relations between the two countries improved, and if their leaders developed a greater sense of trust and mutual regard. So I hope the meeting went well.

In the end, India won by 29 runs. I tried to follow the match online, and I confess that none of it made any sense to me at all. I’m not proud of that fact, however, so I also hope somebody will stop by my office one of these days and explain cricket to me.