The controversies between India and Pakistan have reached their limit during the 2025 Asia Cup, and it has irked many former cricketers. However, the tension was there for a long time. The ICC tournaments are forcefully arranged in hybrid modes due to India's refusal to travel across borders and vice versa. However, this time, every limit was crossed, with players being fined. Pakistani players were seen doing obscene gestures despite ranting not to drag geopolitical tensions onto a cricket field. In such a condition, the former England captain Mike Atherton advised the International Cricket Council not arrange any match between the two during group stages. Atherwon wrote a column for The Times, London where he acknowledged the economic importance of the matches. With no bilateral series going on between the two, ICC might deliberately keep India and Pakistan in a way where they face frequently. Atherton, wrote, "Despite its scarcity (maybe, in part, because of its scarcity) it is a fixture that carries huge economic clout, one of the main reasons why the broadcast rights for ICC tournaments are worth so much — roughly $3 billion for the most recent rights cycle 2023-27. “Due to the relative decline in the value of bilateral matches, ICC events have grown in frequency and importance, and so the India and Pakistan fixture is crucial to the balance sheets of those who would not otherwise have any skin in the game." The bilateral series had stopped after the 2007 attack to Taj Hotel in Mumbai. , a sport that once promoted diplomacy, as Atherton said, is not promoting the cross-border propaganda. Atherton stated, “If cricket was once the vehicle for diplomacy, it is now, clearly, a proxy for broader tensions and for propaganda. There is little justification, in any case, for a serious sport to arrange tournament fixtures to suit its economic needs and now that the rivalry is being exploited in other ways, there is even less justification for it. For the next broadcast rights cycle, the fixture draw before ICC events should be transparent and if the two teams do not meet every time, so be it." Read also: Sidra Amin Reprimanded by ICC for Code of Conduct Breach vs India Atherton added, “This ‘arrangement’ has been tacitly supported within the game for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the inability of both teams, because of political tensions, to meet outside ICC events. The countries have not played a Test against each other since 2007, since before the Mumbai terrorist attacks, and they have not played a bilateral white-ball series against each other since 2013.” Atherton further pointed out that India have played against Pakistan in every group stage of all the ICC tournaments they played after 2013- 50-over World Cups, five T20 World Cups and three Champions Trophies. He further felt that earlier the two countries had a stage to talk and settle things given the permission to tour each other lands for series. Atherton wrote, "ICC events are the only occasions, at present, when the fixture can go ahead and now this must be on neutral territory too — the cause of much debate in the most recent Champions Trophy, when India parked themselves in Dubai for an entire tournament nominally hosted by Pakistan.”