When India played Pakistan at the World Cup in 2023, the subcontinent stopped the clock and over 400 million pairs of eyes fixated on the middle at Ahmedabad. The match up between the two Asian giants has been called the most intense rivalry in cricket. The Ashes may have a longer history, but the intensity, color and narrative of the Green Shirts against the Men In Blue gets commentators and spectators off the edge of their seats before the game. Increasingly, that’s where the real entertainment ends.

The problems begin when the talking stops and the cricket starts. The facts come first. Rohit Sharma’s side are almost guaranteed a place in the Champions Trophy semifinals after beating Pakistan by six wickets in their Group A game in Dubai on Sunday. It was a walk in the park (or desert) for India. Virat Kohli scored the winning boundary to reach three figures and chase down 241 with 45 balls to spare. This was King Kohli at his most focused, cold-eyed and clinical, removed from the emotion of the occasion.

Unfortunately for Pakistan’s fanbase and those hoping for an equal contest between two hugely talented cricket countries, there is only one side that is sure of itself in the pressure cooker. When Mohammad Rizwan and Saud Shakeel came together at 47-2 they rebuilt the innings, more slowly than surely, to at least increase the possibility of a competitive score.

“Saud and I tried to build a partnership and took a lot of time, but after that the shot selection was poor. That’s where they got a chance to take our wickets. Our middle order maybe couldn’t take the pressure,” admitted Rizwan after the match. It has to be said, the skipper started the slide with a hack across the line. He’d just been dropped but didn’t take the hint.

Pakistan has been here before during that World Cup encounter at the Narendra Modi Stadium. The scenarios were frighteningly similar too. Sixteen months ago, Babar Azam and Rizwan had done well to quell early Indian pressure and got the score to 155 for 2 in the 30^th over. As soon as that partnership was broken, the dam burst and they were bowled out for 191. On Saturday, they were 151 for 2 in the 33^rd over. It was a platform built on desert sand.

After the disappointing opening defeat against New Zealand, retired left-arm seamer Mohammad Amir urged the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) to look beyond the Pakistan Super League (PSL) for national team selection. Former captain Shahid Afridi also questioned the retro mindset of the approach on Samaa TV, highlighted by Babar’s pedestrian 64 off 90 balls against the Kiwis. “I knew this is going to happen. If you play cricket from 1980-90 mindset in 2025 then you will definitely lose the game,” said the 47-year-old who played 398 ODIs.

The only way to compete against an Indian team that has now won the last six ODIs in the rivalry is to challenge them with intent as well as application. There were 147 dot balls – the equivalent of half of the 50 overs. The partnership between Shakeel and Rizwan produced the lowest scoring rate in a century stand for Pakistan in men’s ODIs for 11 years. In the other five defeats, the margins have been huge – including eight and nine-wicket losses at the same stadium in 2018. India also prevailed by a gigantic 228 runs in the Asia Cup clash in 2023.

The modern version of this team are now beaten before they start. The 2017 Champions trophy win was an outlier in recent times. That side came in as the least-fancied in the competition. “So mighty India subsided against a team ranked No8 in the world, which they had crushed just over a fortnight ago. Pakistan had delivered a thrashing that no one had expected, which made it all the more mesmerising,” wrote the Guardian at the time. It sums up how the stars align for a golden moment rather than through thorough planning.

That victory was driven by a fresh-faced Fakhar Zaman, a teenage Shadab Khan and a brilliant world-class bowler in Amir who had returned from a long match-fixing ban. The first of those stars was hobbled against the Kiwis in the opener, the second was frozen out of the Champions Trophy squad, and the third is now long retired for a second time.

Pakistani talent will always be there. They might hit another hot streak one day or find coherence for a stunning Test match, but the administrative chaos of governance, selection and trying to keep things on the straight and narrow makes it harder for the team to thrive in a professional environment. India holds them over a barrel right now. Pakistan need to find the courage to compete in a contest next time rather than accept their fate. The sequels post-2017 are getting worse.