So it ends, for now at least, with the lights literally going out on the biggest show in cricket.
After 10 overs and one ball of Punjab Kings’ innings against Delhi Capitals at Dharamsala, a floodlight failure was the perfect cover to evacuate the ground, the match swiftly abandoned with the promise of more information to follow. “A precautionary step,” was how IPL chair Arun Dhumal termed it.
Already, that day’s Pakistan Super League game had been postponed amid rising India-Pakistan tensions. Late in the evening, it was announced that the PSL would be completed in the UAE, with the schedule as yet undisclosed. The next morning, the IPL too was delayed, officially for a week, though with overseas players flying home and the India-England Test series fast approaching, a resumption in September looks more likely. Now reports swirl that the Pakistan-UAE agreement could fall through.
In the short term, you can almost hear the weary sighs from dozens of administrators, who had just about managed to un-concertina the schedule following the Covid-19 pandemic, now having to deal with another squeeze. The de facto IPL window has allowed the BCCI to flex its muscles, keeping overseas players in India for the duration of April and May. A more significant fixture clash, especially in the build-up to a T20 World Cup, could see some boards less happy to let their best players go.
The BCCI has officially announced a one-week suspension of IPL 2025 with immediate effect.
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) May 9, 2025
Further updates on the revised schedule and venues will be shared in due course.#IPL2025 #Cricket pic.twitter.com/qMtY50MhG0
The ripple effects will surely extend beyond a few reshuffled series and restricted NOCs, however. The Asia Cup, already basically an India-Pakistan bilateral series in the guise of a continental tournament, will surely be cancelled. The Women’s World Cup, to be staged in India in October, looms as a test of the ICC’s mettle and of the new way of being. When India refused to tour Pakistan for the Champions Trophy, a conciliatory reciprocal agreement was put in place stating that any further tournaments staged in India would also see Pakistan play on neutral ground, and Pakistan’s players had made clear, even before this new conflict, that they had no desire of travelling to India. But what of the India-Pakistan match itself? That Women’s World Cup is formatted as an eight-team round robin, in which everyone plays everyone. As things stand it is hard to imagine the fixture going ahead, and hard to envisage what that means for the tournament as a whole.
Future events, such as next year’s men’s T20 World Cup, do at least allow for India and Pakistan to be ‘drawn’ in separate groups and kept apart until the final at worst. But that would bring with it more ramifications. India vs Pakistan remains arguably the biggest fixture in all of sport, with 2024’s New York thriller attracting more than 400 million viewers. The Telegraph reports that around 10 per cent of the ICC’s broadcasting value comes from that fixture alone. Should it cease to be played, cricket’s global worth would diminish noticeably, and it’s those at the bottom of the food chain who would most feel the pinch. Already there’s a sense that cricket’s broadcast bubble is deflating. The sharp pin of an absence of India-Pakistan games for the foreseeable could pop it altogether.
Stepping back, it’s a situation that exposes the absurdity of cricket’s global economy and ecosystem, so dependent on this one rivalry. Its value is derived from how fraught and febrile it is, with religious and geopolitical tensions played out on the sporting stage to generate unmissable drama. But that comes with a necessary fragility, and cricket has done little in the way of contingency planning for this predictable eventuality. It’s indicative of a game with no vision or plan, allowed to drift, guided by the BCCI, whose priorities will now significantly shift. Meanwhile, the man nominally in charge of sorting all this out is Jay Shah, the son of India’s home affairs minister, newly installed as ICC chair after five years in charge of the BCCI.
“2024 was the year cricket gave up any claim to being properly administered,” wrote Wisden Almanack editor Lawrence Booth, in response to Shah’s job switch. Now, when the game could do with some proper administration more than ever, everyone could pay the price.
Cricket has stopped, and when it starts again, it will be changed significantly. What happens in between will determine the shape of the sport for years to come.
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