Cricket World Cup: All roads lead to Motera for marquee India-Pakistan clash

India is taking on Pakistan in an ICC Cricket World Cup 2023 match at the Narendra Modi Stadium on Saturday. Meenakshi Rao writes about the mood in Ahmedabad, a day before the arch-rivals face each other.

Ahmedabad (Gujarat): This is Ground Zero, the spot where not just all roads but also all hyper conversations, bated breaths, fans rush, the World Cup’s starry night and, of course, anxious anticipation of the big moment will unfold on a huge Saturday afternoon.

India meet Pakistan in a clash that is reminiscent of their historical rivalry ever since Babar Azam’s nation was sliced away from the parent body and sport became a handmaiden of political showmanship, raising the stakes sky-high for the teams. The very fact that even a final of the World Cup gets stymied by an India-Pakistan encounter shows how packed the dynamite is in the moment.

It’s this high tide that team India has been schooled over the ages to underplay, not just to rein in fan passions and social media rants of the loony fringe, but also to stabilise the mental pressure that the squad gets under every time the cross-border confrontation is set up.

With no possibility of any line of control being respected when it comes to passions wrapping up this gala, Ahmedabad top cop Gyanender Singh Malik’s 11,000 law and order enforcers seem like a tiny island that would be dealing with a tsunami of spectators at 1,32,000 to full capacity. Such is the embedded lesson in crowd control here that 150 IPS and IAS probationers will be attending the match to make notes. Incidentally, the men in uniform are just .08 per cent to the crowd capacity at the imposing Narendra Modi Stadium where even to reach the stands, close to 1.5 km have to be traversed within the premises.

The big fight of the tournament could not have been held anywhere other than Motera for the sheer weight of presence this mammoth facility, sprawling in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s native state, carries. Over a lakh chanting support to India in the absence of Pakistani fans not getting the visa to back their Men in Green and add dimension to healthy stand rivalry, will make it rather linear but the din will be, well, catatonic to say the least.

The BCCI has done its bit to make this battle royale by air-dropping the biggest Bollywood crooners to set off the mood with none less than Arijit Singh, Sukhwinder Singh and the one-breath singer Shankar Mahadevan adding to the razzle-dazzle of the unique Saturday fever.

Giving sub-continental cricket a handle on its geopolitics may have pushed #Boycott on social media bluster by radicalists, who have no interest in the game, but the pressure angle in what players quite unconvincingly talk about as “just another game” gets accentuated by the diplomacy wrap that the game often gets wrapped in.

Be it the “diplomatic series” of 2005 in Pakistan when Osama Bin Laden was fighting just a few miles away from the Peshawar cricket venue where India was playing the hosts, or Zia-ul-Haq grandstanding way back in 1987 by showing up in India for a Test match, ostensibly to garner eyeballs in a century which was alien to Internet – or for that matter Nawaz Sharif suggesting a Crickathon for CHOGM nations – cross-border cricket is much more than just cricket. It has become a vehicle for many strategies other than the ones Rohit Sharma or Babar Azam would discuss in their war rooms before walking into the middle of the bullring.

Back to 2023, already the “patriotic” quotient is being strummed up to a crescendo with songs like “Ae watan mere watan” being repeatedly tested for the mics a day before the match and a grand dais being constructed on the ground for more “Jai Ho” stuff from the Bollywood biggies themselves.

So, whether the pitch will ignite the bats of Virat Kohli and Babar Azam or give currency to Jasprit Bumrah and Shaheen Afridi or, will Kuldeep Yadav spin in the magic, is not visiting the chirp for now. Sold-out medical facilities, hotel rooms going for a couple of lakhs per night, Indian Railways putting two superfast Mumbai to Ahmedabad trains for fans, and planes bringing in fans on packed flights are fueling the puffery.

Not to mention, non-Ahmedabad cities doing their own stuff to cash in with PVR shows for the match and restaurants creating nothing less than the Babar burger for Indian fans to nibble on. And whether it is talk shows on TV or the more “grounded” text stories in the newspapers, for today it is – fever and fervour – unmitigated and non-negotiable.