The Pakcroft drama: everything, everywhere, all at once

To grasp the full extent of the chaos that engulfed Pakistan's final Group A match against UAE in Dubai on Wednesday, you needed to be in three places at once.

At the team hotel in Marina, where uncertainty lingered until the last minute over whether the Pakistan players would leave for the venue as scheduled at 4.30 pm local time. They didn't.

At the Dubai International Stadium in Sports City, a 40-minute drive from the hotel, where the UAE players had arrived on time at 5pm but were unsure of whether they were going to play. The buzz of Pakistan possibly boycotting the game had begun to get louder.

And at the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) headquarters in Lahore, some 5000km away, where its chairman Mohsin Naqvi, who also happens to be Asian Cricket Council (ACC) chief, was in a meeting with two former board chairmen - Ramiz Raja and Najam Sethi - to discuss their next move. There was an initial announcement that the game would be delayed by an hour "for now". That meant the toss at 7pm and the start at 7.30 pm.

While trying to keep up with the deepening intrigue, there was more unfolding at the venue. The man with whom the PCB had a problem - Zimbabwean match referee Andy Pycroft - appeared shortly after 5 pm, only to make a beeline for the exit and to the ICC headquarters a five-minute drive away. The PCB wanted him out; the ICC wasn't budging.

When Naqvi finally posted on social media around 5.45pm that he had instructed the Pakistan team to leave the hotel for the stadium, doubts still lingered over the start time of the match. Organisers had been told 7.30pm but the local liaison team was warned by police that clearing traffic at such short notice was impossible given the weekday rush after 6pm. And it wasn't until after the team departed for the stadium that there was confirmation that Pycroft would officiate the game.

As the politics played out, television news teams pursued the team, broadcasting Pakistan's 40-minute bus ride to the ground. At 6.25pm, the players eventually arrived at the venue, by which time their opponents UAE had finished their drills, held a team meeting, and were waiting for toss time.

While most Pakistan players headed straight for a brief warm-up, the team manager Naved Akram Cheema, captain Salman Agha and coach Mike Hesson attended a closed-door meeting with Pycroft.

Soon after, the PCB circulated a muted video clip to Pakistani media of the team management talking to Pycroft. In an accompanying statement issued minutes before the 7pm toss, the PCB claimed Pycroft had apologised for "miscommunication" that led to the handshake-gate incident during Pakistan's game against India on Sunday.

The development diffused the tension that had built up over the last 24 hours, with Pakistan cancelling their pre-match press conference on Tuesday evening, and the PCB issuing a statement later that night that it was reviewing the team's participation in the Asia Cup.

By the time the Pakistan and UAE players finally walked out for the anthems on Wednesday night, the must-win contest that was about to begin to secure passage to the Super Four felt secondary to all that had gone before.