The title is from a line in Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field; both writers have acknowledged a debt to that excellent history of the game in the subcontinent. The authors have taken off their diplomatic hats in an attempt to say it like it is, and that is the strength of the book. Their respective backgrounds as UN under-secretary general (Tharoor) and Pakistan’s foreign secretary and chairman of the Pakistan Cricket Board (Khan) allow them to place what Guha has called sibling rivalry in the context of the political and cultural changes.