Tour Diary

The inexhaustible kindness of strangers in Pakistan

Over 72 hours in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, our correspondent sees little cricket but comes away with stories and enough love for a lifetime

"Sirri Lanka? Oh Sangakkara!"
I'm not being mistaken for Kumar. This is just how Pakistanis tend to greet Sri Lankans they have just met. It is, I learned on my first trip to Pakistan in 2019, a yearning to make a connection. It is both mini-flex and major compliment: "I know something about your country. And it's something very good."
The Sri Lankan passport is among the most pathetically powerless travel documents on the planet (on par with those of Ethiopia, Iran and Congo, if you're wondering). It is exceedingly rare that anyone has anything nice to say upon your arrival overseas, so this man already has my attention. Then, unprompted, he offers to share his Wi-Fi hotspot with me. This is as winning a one-two combination as a taxi driver has ever delivered to me at an airport. My three-year-old son in Colombo had sent me a burning question in a voice note just as I took off from Dubai. ("Hi, do cheetahs climb trees?") I need to make sure my response has actually gone through for him to see when he wakes up. My phone is not picking up Pakistani telecommunication signals.
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England players take the Kiwis' e-scooters too far

Correspondent Vithushan Ehantharajah goes around a bit to conclude that the outdoor views in New Zealand are better than those in the London Underground

Cricketers (and cricket journalists) are just big kids. That much has been clear over the last week in New Zealand.
If you have been in Christchurch in and around the first Test, you will have been all too aware of an uptick in e-scooter use. Introduced in 2018, they hit top speeds of 27kph (16.7mph in "old money" as Beefy Botham used to say) have a maximum range of 48km (29.7 miles, move on!). Both have been tested robustly by the English.
All novices, of course. All now aware that you really can test a Kiwi's patience. To the bloke I almost took out leaving the gorgeous Riverside Market in the centre of town, I really am sorry. And I probably should have said that at the time rather than accidentally kick-flipping off the curb and accelerating away.
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Blunder down under

Our correspondent finds himself on the verge of entering the sanctum sanctorum of the Indian squad in Australia

Alagappan Muthu
Alagappan Muthu
19-Nov-2024
We were about 10 steps away from… what? Virat Kohli coming out of the shower? Or maybe it'd be someone clicking on the back of Jasprit Bumrah's ear to bring his artificial intelligence online. Eight hours into landing in Australia, I was going to get the scoop of a lifetime.
Eight hours and a sheepish admission that we had no business going into team dressing rooms later, I have this blog entry, which is not the world's worst compromise. Right?
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Learning the sounds of Indian cricket in Mohali

ESPNcricinfo's South Africa correspondent gets caught up in the chanting of a rather sparsely populated PCA Stadium on her first time covering Test cricket in India

In a country obsessed with cricket, Mohali is surprisingly mellow when the game comes to their city.
If you didn't know there was a Test match happening at the Punjab Cricket Association, you may not even notice the flag sellers and face painters milling around the ground in the mornings. They're not like other hawkers, they're more hummingbird: quick but delicate, not loud and forceful. They don't have all that many people to sell to anyway.
Test match crowds are generally smaller than limited-overs' masses in many parts of the world, India included, but Mohali's is particularly small. There were rumours that the barely 2,000 people who passed through the PCA Stadium gates on day one was a record for the opening day for a Test at this venue, but what they lacked in quantity, they made up for in quality.
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