The battle of the peacocks

When India and Pakistan meet in the World Cup tomorrow it will be about more than just cricket. Robert Winder reports

If politics is war by other means, what on earth does that make cricket? India play Pakistan at Bangalore tomorrow at a time when gunfire rattles across the border in disputed Kashmir most days, a time when both countries, like peacocks flashing their tail feathers, are tensing their nuclear muscles. Neither side would have chosen this stage as their battleground: the organisers in particular were praying for a tumultuous India-Pakistan finale. But here we are. All those conspiracy theorists who presumed that the wily subcontinent would orchestrate a grand climax to the competition will have to bite their tongues for a while.

One things is clear, though. Many of the millions of cricket fans in India and Pakistan will be happy to lose the tournament if they can just win this one match. The fraught relations between the two nations, ever since they were wrenched apart by partition 49 years ago, mean that the play really isn't the thing. Stand by, this weekend, for a barrage of military epithets: here comes Waqar Younis booming in like a missile launcher; there goes Tendulkar again, hitting it like a shell, or Inzaman on the rampage. Count how many times the word "gladiatorial" comes up.

The players are pally enough. Two years ago, in Sharjah, they walked out holding hands like children on a nature trail, in an ostentatious gesture of togetherness. And at the beginning of this tournament they had no trouble forming a combined team to play Sri Lanka. But no one else can ignore the historic animosity that charges these matches. India and Pakistan have fought three wars since partition released 10 million vengeful refugees into the subcontinent. The Pakistanis, who were vociferously scornful of Australia's decision to avoid Sri Lanka, have twice cancelled tours to India (in 1992 and 1993) because of the threat from Hindu supremacists. Only this week, there were calls for the Pakistan players to be barred from entering the country.

But they are not ducking out of this one, and the security presence in Bangalore is, not surprisingly, huge: machine guns, sniffer dogs, the works. There have also been threats to dig up the pitch - no easy task, on these hard-baked bowler's graveyards). The response has been, well, typical. When tickets went on sale on Sunday 60,000 people beat a path to the stadium; many of them camped out for the night. In three hours 45,000 tickets were snapped up, and there were scuffles when the crowd sensed that large blocks of seats were being withheld for last-minute VIPs.

It is not as if this match was a regular event. Pakistan have not played in India for nine years (since 1987, when they won a Test match in, as it happens, Bangalore). India even boycotted the annual one-day tussle in Sharjah after Pakistan beat them with the help of three consecutive lbw decisions. The Times of India modestly referred to the match as one between "Cricketing Gods" and concluded, with a nod to India's two recent defeats: "may the worse side win".

This first quarter-final of the World Cup is also - as if it mattered - the start of the tournament proper, the first match which both sides have to win. In a nice twist to the clean religious divide between the teams, India's captain - Mohammed Azharuddin - is a Muslim. He even got into trouble once with his own mullahs for attaching his own sacred first name to a Reebok shoe. There really could not be more at stake. Who said cricket was boring?

On paper, Pakistan might just have the edge (India's game plan so far has been for the other side to drop catches, and it has been only partly successful). But this match is on grass, and Indian grass at that, so it would be churlish to predict an outcome. Pakistan's batting - with Aamir Sohail, Ijaz Ahmed and Inzaman-ul-Haq in exotic form - has been forceful and consistent enough to recover the ground lost in the field. Some of this is merely a matter of planning.

So far, Wasim Akram has placed his fielders with a striking lack of wit, and this in games where the pressure was off. If he persists with the no-one-on-the-leg-side field he seems to favour, India's batsmen will just smack their lips and tuck in. India will depend heavily, as always, on Anil Kumble, one of three Bangalore players in the home side (Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad also hail from the Garden City).

But probably the decisive element will be the crowd. When Waqar Younis ran in to bowl in Karachi against South Africa and England, 30,000 fans whacked empty water bottles against the seat in front: it sounded like a hurricane alert. Tomorrow, there will be jeers. The roar when Tendulkar walks to the crease, on the other hand, will probably shake the windows in Lahore.