Pakistan vs India Cricket: The Pakistani View

Seen from Pakistan, the India fixture is not primarily about India. It is about the fact that Pakistani cricket used to be able to arrange it and no longer can.

For the first fifty-five years of the relationship, Pakistan and India played each other on tours: five-Test series, one-day series, players making their reputations over weeks rather than in a single afternoon. Pakistan won more of those Tests than India did. Pakistan won more of the one-day internationals. Almost none of that record was built at World Cups, because World Cups were not where these teams met.

The fixture Pakistani supporters under thirty have grown up with is a different thing entirely: one match a year, at a neutral or negotiated venue, arranged by the ICC or the Asian Cricket Council, with a result that will be treated as a verdict on the whole national game. That is a poor way to settle anything, and it is the only format available.

Delhi, October 1952

Pakistan's first Test against India was also very nearly Pakistan's first Test of any kind. The country had been granted Test status in 1952 and its inaugural series was in India that October.

India won the opening match at Delhi by an innings and 70 runs, which was a reasonable outcome for a side playing its first Test against one that had been playing them for twenty years. Pakistan then won at Lucknow, which was not reasonable at all, and lost the series. Fazal Mahmood, who two years later would bowl Pakistan to a Test win in England, was the reason for the Lucknow result.

The fixture was therefore competitive from the beginning, and it was also immediately political: a Test series between two states that had been created out of the same territory five years earlier, with families divided across the border and cricketers on both sides who had played together before 1947.

Draws, and then nothing

Between the mid-1950s and the late 1970s the fixture became notorious for producing nothing. The 1954-55 series in Pakistan was drawn across all five Tests. So was the next.

The reasons were partly technical — flat pitches, defensive fields, batting designed to occupy time — and mostly not. Neither board could afford a defeat that would be discussed at home for a decade, and neither captain was going to gamble to avoid a draw. Then the cricket stopped altogether for seventeen years, from 1961 to 1978, as the political relationship deteriorated through two wars.

Cricket resumed with India's tour of Pakistan in 1978-79, and the decade that followed was the most productive the fixture has ever had. Pakistan won that series 2-0. In 1982-83, at home, they won 3-0, with Imran Khan bowling through the series in the form of his life and Zaheer Abbas and Javed Miandad making runs. The Pakistan side of the early 1980s was the strongest the country had assembled to that point, and it was measured largely against India.

The bowling culture that produced Imran and everything after him is set out in the guide to Pakistan's fast bowling tradition.

Bangalore, March 1987

Pakistan have won one Test series in India. It happened at the fifth attempt in one tour and it took a five-Test series to produce it.

The 1986-87 tour ran from January to March 1987. The first four Tests — Madras, Calcutta, Jaipur and Ahmedabad — were all drawn, which by the standards of the fixture was unsurprising. The fifth, at Bangalore, was played on a turning pitch and finished inside four days.

Innings	Score
Pakistan first innings	116
India first innings	145
Pakistan second innings	249
India second innings	204

Pakistan won by 16 runs. Neither side made 250 in the match. The bowling was done by two spinners — Iqbal Qasim, who took twelve wickets in the series, and Tauseef Ahmed, who took sixteen — which is not the attack anybody associates with Pakistan in that decade. Imran Khan captained and was named player of the series.

The innings that is remembered on the Indian side is Sunil Gavaskar's 96 in the fourth innings, played in his final Test series and ended with the target still out of reach. From Pakistan's side, the significance is simpler: it is the only away Test series win in India in the fixture's history, and Pakistan also took the accompanying one-day series 5-1.

Eden Gardens, February 1999

The other Test result Pakistani supporters return to was played in the Asian Test Championship, a short-lived competition that produced one of the fixture's better matches.

Pakistan beat India at Eden Gardens by 46 runs. Saeed Anwar made 188 in the second innings, an innings of a kind he played more often than his reputation suggests. Shoaib Akhtar, then very early in his career and very fast, took four wickets in each innings. Javagal Srinath bowled superbly for India and finished with thirteen in the match, which tells you something about the pitch and rather more about the result.

Pakistan went on to win the championship, beating Sri Lanka in the final in Dhaka by an innings and 175 runs with Ijaz Ahmed making 211. They were, for the competition's brief life, Asian Test champions.

Those two matches — Bangalore and Calcutta — are the Test high points, and both were away from home. Pakistan's home Tests against India were mostly drawn.

Sharjah, and the years Pakistan had a second home

Through the 1980s and into the 1990s a large share of India-Pakistan cricket was played in the United Arab Emirates, in short one-day tournaments arranged by a private promoter with both boards' endorsement.

From Pakistan's side the arrangement had a particular character. The crowds were substantial and drawn from both expatriate communities, but the atmosphere was closer to a Pakistan home fixture than a neutral one, and Pakistan won a high proportion of the matches played there. A generation of Pakistani players — Miandad, Abdul Qadir, the young Wasim Akram, later Saeed Anwar and Inzamam — built one-day reputations in the desert against India at a rate no bilateral schedule could have supplied.

The tournaments faded from the late 1990s after questions about their commercial background surfaced. What they left behind was an important precedent: that India and Pakistan could reliably be made to play each other at a third location when neither would travel. That precedent is the direct ancestor of the modern hybrid hosting arrangements, and the UAE remained the venue Pakistan fell back on for its own home cricket for a decade after 2009.

The two tours nobody expected to happen

India toured Pakistan in 2004 for the first time in fifteen years, and again in 2005-06. Pakistan lost the first of those series and did not win the second, so on the cricket alone they are not results Pakistani supporters dwell on.

The tours mattered for a different reason. Indian supporters travelled in numbers, were given visas, and were received in Lahore and Karachi with a hospitality that surprised almost everyone who reported on it. Shopkeepers refused payment. Crowds applauded Indian centuries. For a fortnight the fixture looked like a sporting occasion rather than a proxy.

That is the version of the rivalry Pakistani cricket lost in 2008 and has never got back. It is also the reason the argument for resumption in Pakistan is rarely made in commercial terms first, even though the commercial case is the stronger one.

The ledger, and how it is quoted

The head-to-head record is used selectively by both sets of supporters, and the honest summary is that it depends entirely on which competition you count.

Context	Where the advantage lies
Tests, 1952 to 2007	Pakistan lead the series record
One-day internationals overall	Pakistan lead comfortably, weighted by the 1980s and 1990s
Fifty-over World Cups	India have won every meeting
Twenty20 internationals	India lead
Champions Trophy	Pakistan won the 2017 final

Precise totals move with each meeting, so this gives standing rather than a scoreline. The Indian reading of the same record, which emphasises the World Cup sequence, is set out in the guide to the India-Pakistan rivalry from India's side.

The reason the two readings differ so much is chronological. Pakistan's advantage was built between 1978 and 2000, in bilateral cricket, by a side containing Imran, Wasim Akram, Waqar Younis, Miandad and Inzamam-ul-Haq. India's advantage has been built since, at tournaments, by much stronger Indian sides. Both are real. Neither settles anything.

Birmingham, then Dubai

Pakistan's two most significant modern results against India came four years apart at ICC events, and both were emphatic in a way the fixture rarely allows.

The 2017 Champions Trophy final at The Oval was won by 180 runs — a margin unlike anything else in the rivalry's white-ball history, achieved by a side that had lost to India in the group stage of the same tournament and had been widely written off. The tournament is covered in the guide to Pakistan's 2017 Champions Trophy title.

Then, at Dubai in the 2021 Twenty20 World Cup, Pakistan beat India by ten wickets. It was Pakistan's first World Cup win over India in any format, ending a sequence that had lasted since 1992 and had become a genuine psychological weight — the single statistic every Pakistani supporter had heard quoted at them for a generation. Babar Azam and Mohammad Rizwan chased without being separated.

The relief in Pakistan was disproportionate to a group match, and reasonably so. A record that long stops being about cricket.

Asia Cup cricket, and the hybrid arrangements

Because the two sides no longer tour, the Asian Cricket Council's tournament has carried more of the fixture than any other competition in the modern period. Pakistan and India have met repeatedly in Asia Cups, occasionally twice in one edition because of the group and Super Four format, which has made the tournament commercially essential and periodically absurd.

It has also produced the hosting compromises. When one of the two countries has held the rights to a tournament, the other's matches have been relocated to a neutral venue under arrangements negotiated between the boards and the organiser. Pakistan hosted the 2025 Champions Trophy with India's fixtures played in Dubai. The competition's history from Pakistan's side is in the guide to Pakistan's Asia Cup record.

Why the asymmetry matters

The two boards are not in the same position, and this is the part of the story least often stated plainly.

Indian cricket's revenue does not depend on Pakistan. The Indian Premier League and India's bilateral schedule against Australia and England generate more than enough, and Pakistani players have not appeared in the IPL since its first season.

Pakistani cricket's revenue is smaller and more concentrated. It rests on the ICC distribution, on the Pakistan Super League, and on home international fixtures which for roughly a decade could not be staged in Pakistan at all — the side played its home matches in the United Arab Emirates after the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore in 2009. Grounds like the National Stadium in Karachi went years without a Test.

A bilateral series against India would be worth more to Pakistan than to India by a wide margin. That is why the calls to resume it come more often from Karachi and Lahore than from Mumbai, and it is also why they carry no weight: the PCB cannot arrange the fixture, and the party that can has no commercial reason to.

What a resumption would need

Three things, none of which cricket administrators control.

Clearance from both governments, which has not been given for a full series since the short limited-overs tour of India by Pakistan across December 2012 and January 2013. Security arrangements acceptable to the visiting board, which is now a smaller obstacle than it was, since Australia, England and other sides have toured Pakistan since 2021. And a political relationship stable enough that a series announced in one month is still viable in the next.

Pakistani players and coaches say publicly and consistently that they want the cricket. So do many of their Indian counterparts. The decision has never been theirs. The wider arc of the national side through all of this is in the history of Pakistan cricket, and the rest of the game there sits on the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page draws on published Test, one-day international and Twenty20 international series records for matches between the two countries, ICC and Asian Cricket Council tournament documentation for the events described, and official scorecards for the 1952, 1987 and 1999 Tests and the 2017 and 2021 matches named. Head-to-head standings are given qualitatively because totals change with each meeting. Political events are stated only where they are matters of public record and no view is offered on them. This site is independent of the PCB, the BCCI and the ICC, and nothing on this page is computed from our own datasets.