With bilateral cricket a casualty of their fraught relations, emotions run high whenever the bitter neighbours lock horns in multi-team events at neutral venues. India’s strained relations with another neighbour, Bangladesh, have further tangled the geopolitics around the World Cup.<\/p>\n
When Bangladesh were replaced by Scotland in the 20-team field for refusing to tour India over safety concerns, the regional chessboard shifted.
\nPakistan decided to boycott the Group A contest against India in solidarity with Bangladesh, jeopardising lucrative fixture that sits at the intersection of sport, commerce, and geopolitics.<\/p>\n
Faced with the prospect of losing millions of dollars in evaporating advertising revenue, the broadcasters panicked. The governing International Cricket Council (ICC) held hectic behind-the-scenes parleys and eventually brokered a compromise to salvage the tournament’s most sought-after contest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":23761,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[20],"class_list":["post-23760","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-sport","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"India and Pakistan will clash in the Twenty20 World Cup in Colombo on Sunday, still feeling the aftershocks of a tumultuous fortnight in which Pakistan's boycott threat, later reversed, nearly blew a hole in the tournament's marquee fixture","published_date":"2026-02-14 00:00:00","news_description":"India and Pakistan will clash in the Twenty20 World Cup in Colombo on Sunday, still feeling the aftershocks of a tumultuous fortnight in which Pakistan's boycott threat, later reversed, nearly blew a hole in the tournament's marquee fixture","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23760\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26633,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/23760\/revisions\/26633"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=23760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}