No winners:

By the looks of it, Pakistan will miss out on yet another cricketing assignment for no fault of its own. There are dark clouds hovering over the prospects of India undertaking the scheduled tour next month.

Though Pakistan has gone the extra mile — miles, in fact — to give sanity a decent chance to prevail, the rhetoric coming out of India so far has been a bit too jingoistic to let

it happen.

With little time left to make proper arrangements and with the Indian government continuing to vacillate on the issue it is obvious that New Delhi is in no mood to see things in a proper perspective.

By playing up the security card and mixing sports with politics, India will face serious consequences on at least two major counts. It will lose hosting rights for the next edition of the World Cup which it is scheduled to hold alongside other cricketing nations in the region, including Pakistan.

And it will lose substantial firepower within the ICC where it has been trying for long to challenge the old guard on the basis of the numerical strength of the Asian sides.

By putting the Asian bloc in jeopardy, India will have to hand back every bit of ground that it had gained in the last few years. Unfortunately, its intransigence will ensure that there are no winners in the equation. — Dawn (Pakistan)