In his Editor's Notes in the 2026 edition of the Wisden Cricketer's Almanack, Wisden Almanack editor Lawrence Booth has criticised India's growing political influence and control over the game of cricket.
Booth called out the growing politicisation of the sport, recounting multiple instances over the past year where cricket took the backseat and the politics around it took the front.
Handshake gate: 'Cricket now a legitimate proxy for more lethal activity'
"Was there a clearer indictment of the game’s governance in 2025 than Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Mohsin Naqvi’s assertion that 'politics and sport can’t go together'? Presumably he had forgotten he was also his country’s interior minister," Booth wrote, pointing out the hypocrisy in Naqvi's statement, which was made in response "to an egregious example of political intrusion – India’s refusal to shake hands with their Pakistani opponents during the Asia Cup in the Gulf, whose previous USP had been as a refuge from realpolitik."
The 2025 Men's Asia Cup was played amidst heightened tensions between the Indian and Pakistan sides as it was the first time the two were meeting on the cricket field after a military conflict earlier in the year. Booth called out attempts from the Indian management and government to link the Asia Cup to the armed conflict.
"It was obvious long before this latest grandstanding that the BCCI were the sporting adjunct of India’s ruling BJP," he wrote. "But the relationship became explicit when India captain Suryakumar Yadav dedicated the first of his side’s three Asia Cup wins over Pakistan to the armed forces. A few months earlier, terrorists had killed 26 in Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to a brief military conflict, complete with codenamed assaults.
"And the idea that cricket was now a legitimate proxy for more lethal activity was hammered home on X by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, after his country beat Pakistan in the final: 'Operation Sindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins!' The real-world Operation Sindoor had left dozens dead, on both sides of the border. Now it was being equated with a game of T20. Suryakumar lapped it up, suggesting 'it feels good when the country’s leader himself bats on the front foot – it felt like he took the strike and scored runs.'”
"If India were so appalled by Pakistan, they should simply have refused to play them. Instead, they opted for humiliation. But it was all performative: before the public snub, the captains had shaken hands in private. And when the two nations’ Under-21 hockey teams met soon after in Malaysia, the game ended with hugs and high-fives. Cricket has become an important piece on the BJP’s geopolitical chessboard, and the Asia Cup descended into tit-for-tat farce, with players on both sides making tasteless gestures about fighter planes, and India refusing to take the stage to receive the trophy from Naqvi (whose busy portfolio includes the presidency of the Asian Cricket Council). At the time of writing, the trophy is thought to be under lock and key in the UAE, a neat symbol of international cricket’s dysfunction."
Also read: Mark Butcher: India and Pakistan players should shake hands to defuse T20 World Cup animosity
Mustafizur's IPL release 'confirms cricket's descent into hands of political masters'
At the IPL 2026 auction, Bangladesh fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman was bought by Kolkata Knight Riders for 9.2 crore Indian Rupees, the only player from his country to be picked up for the league. However, soon after, at the BCCI's behest, KKR had to let him go.
"It was retaliation for the murder of Hindu men in Bangladesh, and a shot across the bows of KKR’s Bollywood owner Shah Rukh Khan – a Muslim, and a regular target of Hindu nationalists," Booth wrote. "The fate of Mustafizur confirmed cricket’s descent into the hands of its political masters, just as Suryakumar embodied its acquiesence."
Mustafizur's exclusion snowballed into a major diplomatic crisis for the sport as Bangladesh pulled out of the 2026 Men's T20 World Cup after the ICC refused their requests to shift their games outside India, and Pakistan threatened to boycott their game against India. Booth compared the incident to the 2025 Men's Champions Trophy, where India's request for a neutral venue was accommodated.
Also read: Gone in 21 days: The sequence of events leading to Bangladesh's ousting from the T20 World Cup
"Faced with a similar situation in 2025, when India refused to visit Pakistan for the Champions Trophy, and insisted on playing all their games in Dubai, the ICC had bent over backwards to accommodate them. But Bangladesh were kicked out of the tournament – despite their request to move games to co-hosts Sri Lanka. Indian apologists were quick to deny the equivalence, arguing that the BCCI had given the ICC more notice than the Bangladesh board, as if that deserved a pat on the back."
Booth called Pakistan's threat of boycott "a desperate and utterly self-defeating response to serial provocation", but added that "their brinkmanship had exposed the fragility of cricket’s finances."
"The sport’s governance grows ever more Orwellian, pretending that Indian exceptionalism comes without consequence, and blaming those lower down the food chain for lashing out. Predictably, almost no prominent voices in the Indian game addressed the root cause of the carnage: the politicisation of a sport that, whatever Naqvi may say, has never been untouched by the real world, yet never more poisoned by it either."
Bazball grew 'dogmatic' and 'deaf to reason'
Booth also had words of criticism for Bazball's failings. England went to Australia with high hopes but their tour came crumbling down as they lost 4-1.
"By Stokes’s own admission, they grew predictable, with the opposition needing only to spread the field and wait for the ball to go in the air. They grew dogmatic, believing the light-touch approach of five previous tours, when they had won the First Test each time, would work in Australia. And they grew deaf to reason, so allergic to 'outside noise' that McCullum pared the backroom staff to a barely functioning minimum, and Stokes dismissed explayers voicing constructive criticism as 'has-beens'. They ran out of ideas – and friends. It didn’t matter that only W. G. Grace, Douglas Jardine and Mike Brearley had a better win percentage among England captains with ten Tests: by losing the room, Stokes had nowhere to go."
"A trip supposed to define an era, described by Brendon McCullum as 'the biggest series of all our lives', descended into dilettantism. What a waste. What a shame."
