I am not passionate about cricket but something happens to me when rivals India and Pakistan meet on the pitch.

As I was preparing to see the match that would start in the early hours of Sunday, February 15, my wife said that she needed to be picked up early from school.

“Can’t you take a taxi?” I asked her, pleading and wondering how she could be so callous and not know that the world usually comes to a complete halt at times such as these when the two countries fight it out on the cricket ground.

Just like my wife who does not care much about such clashes between the neighbourly countries, I read that one company in the UAE was also trying to be a killjoy. It had sent a notice that if anybody fell “sick” on that Sunday, he or she will be fined Dh400 (that works out to Indian rupees 6,640 or Pakistan rupees 11,092).

I wondered how organisations such as these do not realise that expatriates have come far away from home to work hard, long hours to earn money for themselves and their families back home and one of the few joys in their stressful and busy lives is to see their neighbour being beaten to pulp in a cricket match.

I had read a report that before the match Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi had called his Pakistan counterpart Nawaz Sharif and wished his country all the best in the fight ahead. I am sure the Indian prime minister had crossed his fingers behind his back when he phoned.

We have not subscribed to any sports channel and I did not know where to go to get the live streaming of the game, so as soon as my wife left for work I quickly brewed a mug of tea and prepared an elaborate sandwich for the occasion.

Text commentary

I then logged on to one online site where there was live commentary of the match. The only problem was that it was not an audio but a text commentary and gave a ball-by-ball account of the match. There is something more stress-inducing reading about a live match than watching it on TV.

My heart started beating rapidly through the silence and the changing of words on screen.

I was reminded of reports of people literally dying in front of their TV sets in the heat of the moment, so I decided to slow things down and lessen the excitement, and went on to Twitter. There I found Indians and Pakistanis throwing chairs at each other at some joint in Australia.

Cricket is called a gentleman’s game and was invented by the Brits perhaps to help pass their boring long summer days when they were ruling the sub-continent.

Pakistan has never won against India in the World Cup during their five encounters in 1992, 1996, 1999, 2003 and 2011. So this was high pressure stuff.

Just to bring things to a boiling point, a brilliant advert on Star Sports about the clash ahead titled “Mauka Mauka” (Chance in Hindi) taunted the Pakistan team over their failures over the years. It starts off in 1992 and we see a young Pakistani fan with a box of fireworks that he wants to let off following his country’s win over India.

He has to put the box in storage when his national team loses. It happens again and again as the years pass as he keeps putting the box into storage. Finally, we see him with his son watching the 2011 game on TV and he asks with dejection in his voice: “When will we burst those firecrackers?”

Well, India won again in this year’s encounter and so far everyone’s glad that no nuclear war has started.

Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@mahmood_saberi