Oddly enough, in all these years of writing about cricket, I have never watched a 50-over match between India and Pakistan at a cricket ground. I have watched Tests in Lahore, Bangalore and Chennai, and the World Twenty20 final in Johannesburg, but never an ODI, the genre that has engendered much of the passion between the fans of these two countries, where cricket has always been close to the national identity. I was at the 2007 World Cup, but India and Pakistan were in different groups, and in any case both the teams had gone home in disgrace by the time I landed.
So here it is then, it's that time again when cricket acquires an edgy subtext. For a long while this decade, familiarity threatened to breed tedium. But India and Pakistan haven't played each other for more than year - 14 months, 22 days to be exact, and the world has changed quite a bit in between, so inevitably, though not ideally, it will be a bit more than cricket at SuperSport Park in Centurion on September 26.
