The excitement began in January when cricket officials announced that the Men’s T20 Cricket World Cup would mark “a new chapter in the historic rivalry between India and Pakistan”.
Soon after, Nassau County Mayor Bruce Blakeman began calling the tournament a “Super Bowl on steroids” and touting it as a marketing coup for the county, which will host all eight games in a purpose-built 34,000-seat stadium built this spring and scheduled for demolition this summer.
And now the time has finally come: At 10:30 a.m. Sunday, world No. 1 India and world No. 6 Pakistan will face off in a condensed, TV-friendly form of cricket known as T20 in a group-stage match before what is expected to be a sellout crowd at Nassau County International Cricket Stadium at Eisenhower Park in East Meadow. Hundreds of millions of fans are expected to watch the match on television.
In the opening stages of the cup, Pakistan and India were early favourites to win Group A, beating out the United States, Ireland and Canada. Each team will play each other once, with only the top two progressing to the next stage of the tournament.
“The India-Pakistan match will undoubtedly be the match most closely watched by the cricketing world,” said Clarence Modest, a cricket historian who lives in Queens Village and is president of the Staten Island Cricket Club.
In T20 cricket, each team is limited to 20 overs, with each team given 120 legal balls to maximise runs scored. The format, and the power play rules that restrict fielding in parts of the match, encourage aggressive risk taking.
On the International Cricket Council’s website, the $300 standard seats were long sold out, with only luxury options ranging from $2,500 to $10,000 remaining by Friday afternoon. On secondary ticket marketplace StubHub, tickets were being advertised for $629 to $15,300.
India and Pakistan, like many other cricket-playing nations in the world, inherited cricket from their British colonial masters. The two nations are geopolitical rivals and have fought two wars over the disputed territory of Kashmir. They have also nurtured a cricketing rivalry since the 1950s that began in the Test format and continued into the T20 era. India won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007, beating Pakistan, while Pakistan won in 2009. India was runner-up in 2014 and Pakistan was runner-up in 2022. According to the ESPN Cricket Stats Database, India leads the head-to-head battles between the two nations with 8 wins and 3 losses.
Both countries have professional cricket leagues whose players now feature on their national teams, but the Indian Premier League is the world’s most lucrative, attracting stars from around the world for multimillion-dollar salaries and selling broadcast rights for more than $6 billion for 2022.
But fans hoping for an orderly build-up to the showdown — with the two giants of South Asian cricket beating their lesser rivals in the group stages — were left in a state of confusion. On Thursday, the United States, making its first appearance in a World Cup for a country with no cricketing history, beat Pakistan by five runs in Grand Prairie, Texas.
A story on the International Cricket Council’s website declared it “one of the biggest shocks in cricket history” and linked to supporting evidence. ESPN’s SportsCenter ran the story on its front page, Senator Chuck Schumer tweeted it, and Dawn, Pakistan’s largest English-language newspaper, ran the headline “Pakistan Disappoints.”
“They lost badly,” said Ben Rajagopala, an IT professional from Huntington who is rooting for India and plans to watch Sunday’s game with his son. “They probably thought this was a game they were guaranteed to win.” But now, “India is a game they pretty much have to win. If Pakistan loses to India for the second time in a row, their chances are very slim.”
Modesto, the historian, noted that Pakistan has won before and can win again this time. “Pakistan has both the talent and the experience,” he said. “The expectation is that Pakistan will be united.”
Speaking at a news conference Thursday, Blakeman said he plans to bring his family to the game, delivering a familiar line: “Obviously, it’s a Super Bowl on steroids.”
