In the week he might easily be trying Test whites for size, Shoaib Bashir has been cut down, a 20-year-old sent home with a dream on hold, the victim in a game of power that only one side has the appetite to play.
That India, red-hot favourites to dish out a thrashing across five upcoming Tests, has decided to flex its muscle in this way is bizarre but also not entirely unexpected; a rookie who had not even stepped into first-class cricket at the start of last summer now the latest cricketer of Pakistani descent to be thrust into an international political storm, all while chasing paperwork across two continents in what must be an overwhelming ordeal.
The external perception that India, as a cricket force with no equal and one increasingly indistinguishable from its government, does what it wants without consequence is not new. The organisation of last year’s World Cup showed that even when the game’s global governing body, the International Cricket Council, is nominally in charge, their logo plastered all over the grounds, it is India and its Board of Control for Cricket that calls the shots.
Criticism of that inarguable fact does not go down well in India, where it is, justifiably, blasted as hypocrisy, given the age for which cricket — and, indeed, the country — was ruled by whites from the West.
But this is something more sinister than a late venue change, a pitch switch without proper approval or the confiscation of bottled water on a searing day — even if belatedly issued after a trip back to London on the eve of the First Test.
Cricket has long been seized upon by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi as a political tool, and so, too, has anti-Muslim sentiment, encouraged and on the rise under the populist strongman’s rule. As he seeks, and will no doubt get, re-election this year, the marriage of those threads is no coincidence.
That England might have made some grand stand in the form of a boycott or refusal to travel was always fanciful. Administrators, coaches and players alike rely too heavily on a market and a country that is the sport’s great financier.
It is grim, though, that Bashir, a young player making his first steps in the international game, appears unwelcome there.
