A 2,500-seat stadium in suburban Nagoya has become the unlikely setting for one of sport’s most combustible rivalries — and a glimpse of cricket’s growing reach beyond its traditional heartlands.

There are few sporting rivalries capable of transporting an entire stadium thousands of miles away from home. On Saturday, India and Pakistan managed precisely that — turning a modest Japanese baseball facility into an arena charged with all the anticipation, colour and emotion normally associated with the great cricket grounds of South Asia.

The setting could hardly have been more incongruous. The Asian Games final was being staged at Korogi Athletic Park in Nisshin, near Nagoya, a purpose-built cricket venue with capacity for only about 2,500 spectators. Beyond the boundary stood the unmistakable features of a Japanese baseball ground, including a pitcher’s mound.

Yet for those inside, this was no novelty fixture.

Hours before the first ball, Indian and Pakistani supporters were queuing to enter. Flags were draped over shoulders, shirts provided the national colours and tickets had become sufficiently scarce to generate reports of inflated resale prices. For many members of the South Asian communities living in Japan, the occasion represented a rare chance to see the two countries meet in person.

That matters because India-Pakistan cricket is not simply another international sporting contest. Political tensions mean that the teams generally encounter each other only in major tournaments, making every meeting an event in its own right. Their February T20 World Cup encounter in Sri Lanka was played before a sell-out crowd of 35,000; television audiences in the two countries routinely run into the hundreds of millions.

Japan therefore found itself hosting one of cricket’s most valuable commodities: scarcity.

For Japanese spectators, meanwhile, the spectacle offered an introduction to a sport that remains distinctly niche in the country. Some had attended earlier matches simply out of curiosity. Teachers from nearby Gifu admitted that they knew virtually nothing about cricket, but found themselves enjoying the experience after reading explanatory material and watching the action.

The comparison with baseball is inevitable. Japan possesses one of the world’s great baseball cultures, while cricket remains a relative outsider. But the recent arrival of India has provided an intriguing bridge between the two.

Last week, Japan played India in its first-ever T20 international against a full-member cricket nation. The hosts came within two runs of a remarkable victory in a rain-shortened five-over contest, giving Japanese cricket precisely the sort of exposure its administrators could scarcely have manufactured themselves.

The significance extends beyond the scoreboard.

India’s appearance in Japan was linked to the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the countries, while the Asian Games have provided an unusually prominent platform for cricket. The sport is already established among expatriate communities, but encounters involving India’s global stars can introduce it to an entirely new audience.

That is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Saturday’s extraordinary scene. Cricket did not need to conquer Japan overnight. It merely needed to persuade a few thousand people to come and watch.

And India versus Pakistan is perhaps the ultimate sales pitch.

The match was always going to generate passion. What nobody could have guaranteed was that the passion would survive the journey from the packed stadiums of Colombo and Mumbai to a small baseball field outside Nagoya.

It did.

The geography changed. The rivalry did not.

Main Image: By 運動会プロテインパワー – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112511600

The war between the United States and Iran is no longer just a confrontation between Washington and Tehran. A second contest is taking shape alongside and behind it. China is not fighting the United States directly, but its economic, technological and diplomatic links to Iran are complicating Washington’s strategy and ability to win the conflict. […]

The post The China factor behind the Iran war appeared first on Asia Times.

When governments talk about reducing dependence on the Strait of Hormuz, the discussion usually turns to pipelines in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. For Asian importers, that is only part of the story. The physical bottleneck is in the Persian Gulf, but much of the economic exposure sits thousands of kilometers to the […]

The post Asia can’t just pipeline its way around Hormuz appeared first on Asia Times.

Not to be disheartened by adversity or elated by happiness—
that is the mark of a strong spirit and a mighty power.

Niccolò Machiavelli

Should we expect the future to be worse than before? As trivial as this might sound, it all depends on us. No matter how complex and confused, the international environment can be apprehended and adjusted, as well as managed. All the elements forming today’s global palette are obvious, and they existed before. Today, they have manifested themselves in a new quality (with greater intensity) and in a different sequence with everything happening all at once.

The accumulated experience must be treated as a guideline rather than a dogma, including negative experiences, which teach us what we should not do. The last three decades have been a case in point. There can be different ways of evaluating the intentions of those who shaped history in late 20^th century, but the results that are visible today demonstrate that this stage in the development of international relations cannot and should not be replicated.

Instead of crowning global political development, this era was marked by the post-WWII model falling into crisis. In itself, this is not a tragedy since no system has ever been nor will be set in stone. Even the most outstanding projects have a limited lifespan.

Will the future be better for those living in today’s world compared to those who preceded them? Not necessarily. After all, future is always a set of probabilities that come to fruition to various degrees. There are specific patterns defining the way developments unfold, but it all depends on how responsible we are in our approach.

The expectation that the “end of history” would address all the challenges and lead us towards a brighter future for the so-called “last man” failed to materialise, which was to be expected.

If becoming the last man is not what people really want, they should realise that charting the future is not the apanage of neither natural forces, nor social development patterns, nor sophisticated robots, nor AI. It is in their hands. Taking responsibility for the future is not a slogan but a behavioural imperative. Over the course of history, humankind has invented so many effective ways of destroying itself ranging from physical annihilation to moral destruction. These are the fruits of progress too. We do not need a future that would be better than the past. We need a future that will not be worse. Overall, having a future is what matters the most.

Authors: Oleg Barabanov, Anton Bespalov, Timofei Bordachev, Fyodor Lukyanov, Andrey Sushentsov, Ivan Timofeev.

You can download the report here.

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