India & Pakistan should no longer be in the same group in future ICC events: Ex-England captain

Former England cricketer and commentator Michael Atherton has stated that India and Pakistan shouldn’t be a part of the same group in the forthcoming ICC events after witnessing what has happened in the recently concluded Asia Cup 2025 campaign.

For the unversed, Indian players decided not to shake hands with the Pakistan players in all the games they had clashed against each other. Interestingly, India locked horns with Pakistan on three instances in the Asia Cup 2025 campaign, winning all three of them.

In his column for The Times newspaper in the UK, Atherton acknowledged the reason why the apex body goes ahead with India and Pakistan in the same group. However, he asserted that for the next broadcast rights cycle, the draw before the ICC events should be transparent. 

“Despite its scarcity (maybe, in part, because of its scarcity) it is a fixture that carries huge economic clout, one of the main reasons why the broadcast rights for ICC tournaments are worth so much — roughly $3 billion for the most recent rights cycle (in) 2023-27,” he wrote.

“Due to the relative decline in the value of bilateral matches, ICC events have grown in frequency and importance, and so the India and Pakistan fixture is crucial to the balance sheets of those who would not otherwise have any skin in the game,” he added.

“If cricket was once the vehicle for diplomacy, it is now, clearly, a proxy for broader tensions and for propaganda. There is little justification, in any case, for a serious sport to arrange tournament fixtures to suit its economic needs and now that the rivalry is being exploited in other ways, there is even less justification for it,” Atherton went on to write.

“For the next broadcast rights cycle, the fixture draw before ICC events should be transparent and if the two teams do not meet every time, so be it,” he concluded.

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