‘Five times the Super Bowl’: Why India vs Pakistan is a sporting rivalry like no other

New Delhi and Islamabad CNN —

In October 1952, five years after the Indian subcontinent won independence from its British colonial rulers, a young Pakistan cricket team stepped foot in the newly formed Republic of India.

They had arrived to play a highly anticipated test series – the first for Pakistan after the country’s creation in 1947.

For many of the players, the drive from Lahore in the Muslim-majority nation of Pakistan, to Amritsar in Hindu-majority India, brought back painful memories of a bloody partition – one that hastily divided the former colony along religious lines with devastating results and gave rise to a fierce geopolitical rivalry.

In the 76 years since, India and Pakistan have fought three wars and introduced heavy restrictions on exchanges of goods or civilians, despite the two countries sharing a border, a culture and a deeply intertwined history.

And among that shared culture is a near universal love of cricket.

Pakistan has not toured India since 2016. But on Saturday, for the first time in seven years, these two rivals will play each other on Indian soil in the opening stages of Cricket World Cup, which India is hosting.

That game, said Farees Shah, host of the Shiny Side Cricket Podcast, could have “easily half a billion people” watching.

“This is five times the Super Bowl,” he said. “There are few rivalries that compare.”

Indian batsman Vijay Hazare is bowled by Pakistan's Amir Eliah during the Test Match in New Delhi in 1952.

Often described as one of the greatest sporting grudge matches in the world, an India-Pakistan cricket match is always bound up in the geopolitical faultlines that separate the two nations.

Yet the game, a legacy of British colonial rule, has also shown it has