Associating cricket with patriotism is a modern-day narrative. In the 1980s, the game carried no such baggage. For my friends and me, cricket was about talent, style, and charisma. The postcards we treasured most were not of Indian players but of Pakistani cricketers like Imran Khan, Javed Miandad, and Wasim Akram, or West Indian legends like Viv Richards, Malcolm Marshall, and Michael Holding. We admired them because they were brilliant, not because they wore the same flag we did.
Back then, cricket was closer to art than ideology. Each player was a performer whose strokes, swings, and spells stirred our imagination. The game was global, and admiration flowed across borders without hesitation. It was not considered unpatriotic to clap for a Pakistani cover drive or to marvel at a West Indian fast bowler tearing through a batting order.
This innocence changed in the 1990s. Liberalization, satellite television, and aggressive advertising turned cricket into a commercial carnival. The India–Pakistan rivalry was marketed not just as sport, but as war without weapons. National pride began to be measured in runs and wickets. By the 2000s, the script was set: to cheer for an opposing player was to betray the nation.
What was once admiration became allegiance. What was once appreciation became patriotism.
Looking back, I sometimes wonder: was cricket more beautiful when it was free of nationalism? Or was it inevitable that politics, commerce, and media would recast it into a symbol of national pride? Perhaps the real question is—did we lose something human when sport was claimed by the flag?