Pakistan

No fixture in Pakistani cricket carries the weight of a meeting with India. The two sides have played 212 times across all formats, and Pakistan holds the edge in the longer game — 12 wins to 9 in Tests, 73 to 58 in one-day internationals — while India leads in Twenty20. The rivalry has survived by not being played at all for long stretches: bilateral cricket stopped between 1962 and 1977, and again after the Kargil war of 1999 and the Mumbai attacks of 2008. Since 2008 India has refused any bilateral series, so the two now meet only when an ICC or Asian Cricket Council draw forces the issue, which is part of why each meeting is treated as an event rather than a fixture.

The team itself dates to 1947, formed alongside the new state of Pakistan, with the Pakistan Cricket Board inaugurated in Karachi two years later before eventually settling at Lahore's Gaddafi Stadium. Three ICC titles anchor its history, spaced almost a generation apart: the 1992 World Cup, won under Imran Khan against England; the World Twenty20 in 2009, beaten Sri Lanka in the final; and the Champions Trophy in 2017, where Misbah-ul-Haq's side ambushed India in the final having lost to them in the group stage days earlier.

Wasim Akram remains the team's defining bowler, its leading wicket-taker in both Tests and one-day cricket and the man who gave the 'Sultan of Swing' tag real meaning. The production line since has run through the National Cricket Academy in Lahore, which turned out Shaheen Shah Afridi as a teenage prospect from the 2018 Under-19 World Cup into the current T20 captain — a pipeline the board leans on precisely because so few fixtures against its fiercest rival are left to chance.