Apart from the many delights Aichi-Nagoya 2026 will send our way, there’s another non-medal event that sports fans can easily get involved in and keep tabs. It is called Handshake Watch. The number of times Indian and Pakistani athletes shake hands with each other before or after matches.
In terms of general handshake refusals, an Indian has already featured in one at Aichi-Nagoya—MMA fighter Suchika Tariyal inconsolable after missing out on a place in the 60kg final and fighting for gold, because of a tie-breaker rule (in which the lighter fighter at the weigh-in goes through) did not want to shake her hands with the referee or her Singaporean opponent.
But that’s not what is being talked about here. Last month, when the Indian men’s hockey team met Pakistan at the FIH World Cup, never mind the heresy of handshakes, as part of hockey protocol the players high-fived each other before the match. Already, the Indian and Pakistani men’s and women’s table tennis teams have played each other and when the Indians won both encounters, there was no fist pumping or chest-thumping.
Only the basic respect from one athlete to another. The exchange was perfunctory amongst the women and more regular amongst the men, but there was both eye contact and Indian hands shaking Pakistani hands and the cardboard patriots pretended it didn’t happen. No one in of any of the Indian hockey or table tennis teams would count themselves less of a patriot than the cricketers.
What is particularly good to know is that the Asian Games organisers have not put the Indians and the Pakistanis in the same group across many other sports. Not even in cricket. The Games official broadcasters didn’t go into in a tools-down protest nor bawl in bathrooms. Social media teams aren’t occupying useful hours creating faux lukewarm “rivalry” posts. Table tennis was in fact an anomaly; when groups were decided in team competition be it in hockey, volleyball, squash, badminton, India and Pakistan were treated normally and not like precious cargo or ATMs.
An Indian and a Pakistani competed in soft tennis on Tuesday morning because the other tennis, the two squabbly neighbours seem to agree, is off their priority lists. We know the javelin boys on both sides have manners and even though Neeraj Chopra sadly won’t be around, everyone in the field senses that the fellow who threatens to own the handshakes and the podium is Sri Lankan.
In the list of sports in Aichi-Nagoya, cricket’s place has been slotted in between “canoe sprint” and “cycling road” and it is safe to say that none of the three will feel threatened by the other. Just because cricket makes GazillionX than canoeing and cycling, neither canoeists or cyclists actually yearn to be cricketers. Now, whether they would have wanted to be football players though…
In comparison to the other sports on offer, cricket looks a bit tepid, the competition itself lasting about as long as an IPL preview show. In case of match cancellations due to bad weather, teams move ahead depending on their ICC ranking, which is what happened in the first Bangladesh-China women’s encounter. In Hangzhou 2023, it was rain that awarded the Indian men’s team its gold medal against Afghanistan.
The India v Japan men’s T20I on Tuesday was a diplomatic event where handshaking formed part of the backdrop and the pre-match shot of Shreyas Iyer and Kendall Kadowaki-Fleming with the Suzuki Cup Trophy would have scored a 10 were there gymnastics judges around to mark the moment.
After the Indian women cricketers won their gold medal, they piled onto the podium together with Sri Lankans and Pakistanis to get into a single frame of the medallists. The men at the time were in Sano, about 450m east of the Asian Games venue where they beat Japan by two runs in a five-over-each bash. Frankly, an Indian team victory over Japan in the women’s badminton would have been far more useful.
However flimsy cricket may appear at these multi-discipline mega-events, it is good, particularly for Indian cricket, to be outside their bubble and on the same footing as how other sports and their athletes find themselves. Our women’s captain is HK Bhullar on the scoreboard and NKR Kaki and TTV Namboori are part of the men’s cricket squad. Cricket is being held in a corner of the centre of the Asian Games venues, 20km east of Nagoya city, of as much note to the majority of the Games population as kurash and kabaddi.
The handshake alerts will get sounded again once the men’s event, which begins on Thursday, gets into medals territory, should India and Pakistan meet in the final. Everyone will notice perfectly polite young men abandoning their manners after the match and getting into a parallel cold-shouldering contest egged on by their administrators and their media cheer leaders.
It wouldn’t make for a particularly pleasant look for the rest of the sporting world where everyone is aware of India’s ambitions to host the 2036 Olympics. The IOC president Kirsty Coventry, who was at the Games, will also be notified of this unending development.
So far Handshake Watch has gone by without incident but in week two, it could eventually become the only thing that gets Asian Games cricket some global notice outside the bubble and once again amplifies its pointlessness.