It is not often that two sets of people find themselves in the same situation on each side of one of the most fractious borders in the world.
Friday, it appeared, in the middle of the whirling rumors of missiles demolishing the districts and lies on the captured pilots, the cricket players in India and in Pakistan felt that something was going to give.
The Pakistan Super League acted first, telling all its players, coaches and officials to stay in their hotel rooms, bags wrapped instead. At one point of the day, the call would come, they were told, and they should be ready to go to the airport and go to the United Arab Emirates where the last eight games of this tournament could take place.
In India, the first signs of the precariousness of the situation emerged the day before when a match between the Capitals of Delhi and the kings of Punjab was interrupted after 10.1 overs when the spotlights left in Dharamsala. Initially, a technical failure was considered the problem, but when senior officials of the Himachal Pradesh Cricket Association came out on the ground to urge the crowd to disperse calmly, Le Penny fell.
On the advice of the security agencies and the government of the State, the powers in place which direct the cricket have been informed in uncertain terms that this show must not continue. About 200 km in Jammu drone attacks and missile strikes have been thwarted, air raid sirens sounded and the city was thrown into a full power outage.
In the end, the Cricket Control Council in India announced that the 2025 edition of the Indian Premier League had been suspended for a week, and another decision on the fact that the tournament would resume, will be played later in the year or moved to another country would then be taken.
At the same time, the logistics teams of IPL franchises rushed to understand how to bring players abroad to their pronate country. “Listen, even if it resumes in a week, players can come back. For the moment, their safety and mental comfort are the most important thing for us,” said a Delhi capital official, refusing to be appointed as the situation was in flow. “We examine charter flights, commercial airlines, all options. In the end, the players will take the call, but I am sure they are waiting for the opinions of their respective countries. ”
There were 12 championship games plus the playoffs and the last to play in the IPL when he was suspended. Although it may seem that it was the most obvious thing to do, given the insignificance of a cricket tournament in the largest scheme of things, the IPL is in fact an unusually precise barometer of the state of affairs in India.
The president of the IPL, Arun Singh Dhumal, is the brother of Anurag Thakur, the former secretary and politician of the BCCI of the Bharatiya Janata power party and was variously the Minister of the Union for Sport, Information and Radiation and Finance. The most recent secretary of the BCCI and the current chief of the International Cricket Council, Jay Shah, is the son of Amit Shah, the Minister of Internal Affairs.
This overlap and the proximity of the policy and the cricket guarantee that the IPL is perfectly aware of the situation on the ground and the speed with which things could degenerate or defuse. Aside from obvious security threats, people involved in IPL have the pulse of the nation.
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The preponderance of probabilities: the physical danger for those involved, the feeling of the greatest segment of the public and the attacks that the sponsors felt involved in something that could badly against the fires, if something unfortunate happened, meant that IPL had to be suspended.
This decision shows that the IPL has learned when it has taken place for too long in the middle of the Cavid-19 pandemic. At a time when there were no hospital beds to be made and the crematoriums lacked wood to burn, this Clariard de Cricket festival and excess continued until the public could no longer take it and a wave of negative reactions constrained the hand of the administrators.
Taking out a tournament of this scale is not a light decision, given the wide range of stakeholders. Since those who take advantage of it directly – the players, the broadcasters, the support staff – the wider cricket ecosystem which reaches its annual targets in two months of competition, there is so much driving on the IPL that even suspending it is temporarily to thousands of people.
But the time had come when it was no longer a question of disadvantage or trade. Even IPL does not play when it is a question of life or death.
