Asian Cricket Council (ACC) president Mohsin Naqvi has again made it clear he will not forward the Asia Cup trophy to India by courier or through a third party. The champions, he says, must collect it from him face-to-face.
“As ACC President, I was ready to hand over the trophy that very day and I am still ready now,” he wrote on X after a board meeting in Dubai on Tuesday. “If they truly want it, they are welcome to come to the ACC office and collect it from me.”
That meeting, attended in person by officials from the other Asian boards, offered no breakthrough. The BCCI joined via video link, with vice-president Rajeev Shukla and former treasurer Ashish Shelar on screen, but the call ended without agreement on when – or indeed if – Suryakumar Yadav’s side will receive the silverware and the winners’ medals that go with it.
The whole row stems from Sunday’s final. When the post-match ceremony began in Colombo, Naqvi, who is also Pakistan Cricket Board chair and the country’s interior minister, stepped onto the podium expecting to present the cup. The Indian players declined. What followed was an awkward, hour-long impasse in front of a lively, mostly full house. Eventually Kuldeep Yadav, Tilak Varma and Abhishek Sharma took their individual awards from other dignitaries, an ACC staffer removed the trophy, and India celebrated without it.
That flashpoint capped a tetchy tournament between the old rivals. Handshakes were avoided before tosses, after matches, sometimes both. Pakistan skipper Salman Ali Agha was openly unimpressed, calling the non-handshakes “unfortunate” on more than one occasion. On 14 September, comments made by Suryakumar after the first group game earned him an ICC sanction and cost him 30 per cent of his match fee. A week later Haris Rauf paid the same price for gesturing at the crowd.
Tension did little to spoil the cricket, at least for neutrals. India won two of the three men’s contests, including that dramatic final, the first the two countries have ever played for an Asia Cup title. Suryakumar later pointed to the win-loss record and suggested the fixture is “not really a rivalry any more” – a remark that went down as you might expect on the other side of the border.
Next up, a different stage. The women’s ODI World Cup reaches Colombo on 5 October, when India and Pakistan meet in what will surely be a far less spite-laden atmosphere. Or so everyone hopes.
Whether the men’s trophy will have changed hands by then remains, for the moment, an open question.
