No politics,only sport as India-Pak meet on another field

“We’ve been preparing the last 4-5 months just for this match,” said Khurram Haroon,the Pakistan manager. “If there’s a team that’ll play with heart on Saturday,it’ll be Pakistan. We’ll try our best to beat India,” he says,determined to erase memories of the 92-0 thrashing a season ago.

Both sides pledge to sporting spirit and civility in competition and recall not a single jarring incident going out of hand. But no one pretends it is just another game of ruggers.

On the edge

“Everyone talks about it,and to a certain extent,these games are bound to have an edge,” says India captain Nasser Hussain. He adds how,when they first played Pakistan in Hong Kong,the organisers were more worried than players and didn’t know what to expect.

All teams in Malaysia have been mingling easy,having dinners together,and the Indians even cheered on Pakistan,the underdogs against the mighty Chinese. “But when it comes to playing them on the field,it’ll be a good hard game,” the 28-year-old says.

Spicing up the contest is the fact that there are a number of players from the Army in the Indian team. Star forward Bikash Jena happens to be an armyman who isn’t new to India-Pakistan games. “On the ground,we might be enemies,but we stay within the limits of sportsmanship. When playing,our intention is never to particularly hurt them,and rugby’s disciplined our feelings even more,” Jena says. “But it helps that Pakistan’s players have never behaved like ‘enemies’,so there’s never been a provocation or reaction,” he adds.

India have won each of their three face-offs — winning their first-ever international match at the expense of Pakistan in 2003. Funnily,after their 92-0 whitewash last year,a distraught Pakistan coach had brooded about the hopelessness of his job,while the Indians were the ones who offered consolation. “That was a wake-up call to them,that they couldn’t just land at an international match and get steamrolled by such a huge margin,” says India’s manager and first captain Aga Hussain.

But the senior official sees no sense in drumming up jingoistic frenzy,admitting they are charged up on their own,and need no extra hysterics. “We don’t use rhetoric because we’d rather go in level-headed and play coolly than lose because our energies were diverted,” he says.