Rusty, anxious, and ready

When Bobby Gill's mother was pregnant with him, his father - a strapping young man famed for his resemblance to Rajesh Khanna - did not want another child. They already had a few, and so he asked his wife to eat garam khanay(dishes supposed to have "warming" properties), in order to induce an abortion. "Magar us sab ke bawajud, aaj aap dekh rahay hain, mei khara huun aap ke samnay. (But despite all that, as you can see, I am standing before you today.)

It is a terrible cliché to use your taxi driver as a metaphor in your story, but as Bobby drove me around Lahore's 40°-plus afternoon, I couldn't help but feel that his anecdote perfectly captured what I had come to report on - cricket had died out, yet it stood before me today.

"You see, this tour is an IV drip for cricket, there's no doubt about that. But cricket is still on the borderline." Mian Mansur Hamid is drenched in sweat, sitting on a bench near the nets of Yuslim cricket club in Model Town, of which he is the president. He likes listening to Pink Floyd and Dire Straits, he likes that his club gave young kids a direction and a future, he likes that parents increasingly saw cricket as a profession, and he loves how much his young bowlers, particularly Raza Hasan and Usman Qadir, had tested him in the nets just now. He liked that this tour was taking place, but the question in his mind was the one that many in Pakistan's cricket community don't want to think about just yet - will this tour be a one-off? If not, who else would be desperate enough to send a team to sweltering Lahore amid suffocating security?

There's no doubt that the authorities are desperate to pull this off without a hitch. The Gaddafi sits in the heart of contemporary Lahore, amid many busy markets and malls. Bobby tells me that the entire area will be shut to anyone except fans, effectively forcing people like him to go a day without work.

Soon we realise that there is another opportunity that he has lost out on - he could have made a killing as a blackiya. We are at Liberty market, which is a stone's throw from where the attack on the Sri Lankan team took place. The PCB has left a large shipping container there, which we are told has been locked all day. It was has been modified to serve as a ticket booth, but a security guard there informs everyone that all tickets for the two T20s have been sold out, and no one from the PCB will be coming here. But that doesn't mean we can't buy tickets.

Tariq Saleem is a gardener with a local municipal body, and he took the day off to show up at the booth early in the morning with the hope of getting a ticket for the general stands, slated at Rs 250 (approximately US$2.50). Instead, what he found was that the only tickets available were in the hands of those selling them "in black" - the blackiye. Tariq had managed to bargain one down to offering four tickets for the general stand at Rs 1000 ($10) each, though he could barely afford to pay Rs 800. When I walked up to two slim boys wearing brightly coloured sunglasses, they quoted a price of Rs 2200 ($22) for a ticket in the general stands.

But Tariq wasn't blaming the board, and his reasoning was, perversely, the most optimistic thing I heard all day. In this case, Tariq told me that the black market was being supplied by employees of Gourmet Bakeries, a chain that was also handling ticket sales (along with an online vendor).

The PCB's decision to switch ticket sales from banks (as had been the case before) to Gourmet Bakeries for this series, had been welcomed by quite a few people. The chain is ubiquitous across Lahore. When I visited their sprawling headquarters in a Lahore suburb, they chuckled quietly at Tariq's theory, and shared a few they had heard themselves. Then their team launched into a detailed analysis of the logistics the task had involved, and the checks they had put in place. Most importantly for Tariq's theory, all sales for more than four tickets required the branch to contact HQ.

As I sat with them, there was a point where one of them began to wave some cardboard bats with "6" and "4" on either side, and was reminded of what Osman Samiuddin had described as the jazba of the early days of cricket in Pakistan. The bats had been printed hours ago, and were the latest of various demands that the tour was creating for the company. Before that, there had been a long meeting about the logistics required to feed the 12,000 policemen on duty for the match. And prior to that, they realised that the ice cream sold at the ground would need dozens of bicycle vendors, rather than the large freezers they had considered installing.

Many of these problems reflected the rustiness of not having hosted cricket for so long, yet there was an urgency to pull off these tasks, because the tour had become a matter of national prestige. The Gourmet team, swamped with calls from newly found relatives and long lost friends asking for tickets, had been catering to last-minute demands, citing patriotism for their efficiency.

Of course, the company also stood to gain from the marketing opportunities, and so the jazba was perhaps a bit more commercial and not as idealistic as in the past.

But then, a young person tweeted to me that he was trying to look up the Zimbabwean national dress so he could wear it to the ground along with the Zimbabwe flag he had made. Others told me how the social media forums at my old university were swamped with people giddy about going to the match. And it suddenly struck me that for an entire generation of young Pakistanis, Friday would be the first time they would ever go to see an international match in their own country.

The Gaddafi stadium, which they had grown up visiting only for the various restaurants that exist around it, was never seen in its role as a temple for cricket. Tomorrow will be the first time they experience the rush of walking through a darkened tunnel that will open out to a blaze of green outfield and a noise so intense that they can touch it.

And sitting here tonight, in the final 24 hours of a six-year wait, I feel that we will realise the impact of the return just hours before the match begins. Right now there is a sense of caution, of frustration and a realisation that cricket is not returning to a Pakistan safe for Pakistanis. But then again, if a recovery will be made, this is one of the ways it can start.

Pakistan sleeps with anticipation tonight.