The perfect settings for a cricket match

Sunday November 6

Bagh-e-Jinnah is the Kew Gardens of Lahore, the most pukka of public parks. Established in 1860 by the Agriculture Horticulture Society of India, it is populated to this day by more than 6000 varieties of rare trees and shrubs, and offers tranquil respite from Lahore's urban insanities. A magnificent colonial-era library provides a cool and collected retreat from the rickshaw-infested mayhem of the Mall, but the centrepiece, beyond any doubt, is the Lahore Gymkhana Cricket Club - the venue for England's latest and last warm-up.

There can't be many more beautiful settings for a cricket match. The Gymkhana Ground is a perfectly proportioned oval, floating in a sea of flowerbeds and ring-fenced by low railings and a tall canopy of breeze-attracting trees. A red-tiled pagoda-style pavilion adorns the southern side of the ground, while on big-match days the press and guest spectators are housed beneath billowing canopies on either side of the sightscreen. And there have been some extremely big matches here as well, including three Tests - against India, New Zealand and West Indies - way back in the 1950s.

As far as I'm concerned, these are the settings that all first-class matches should be afforded - in England as well as elsewhere, for let's face it, attendances will always be sluggish at anything below Test level. Bagh-e-Jinnah, like Arundel Castle in England, offers easy access for the curious, stunning aesthetics for the otherwise indifferent, and plenty of opportunity to stroll to and from the action as one sees fit. And though England hardly endorsed my final point with their dismal batting today, a small but intimate crowd beats a large and echoing concrete bowl hands down. It should also, in theory, bring out the best in the players - and in the home side's case, perhaps it did.

In this day and age, sadly, the drawbacks are all too obvious. In September, a pair of bomb blasts in the city caused the cancellation of Australia A's open-air appearance at Bagh-e-Jinnah. Instead, they retreated to the fortress of the Gadaffi Stadium in Gulberg, which is not only one of the most intimidatingly impregnable stadia in the whole subcontinent, it also lies deep within a private complex alongside the National Hockey Stadium and the PCB Academy. It is to the ECB's credit that they didn't allow themselves to be similarly spooked, although the proximity of the team hotel - a two-minute jog down the road - doubtless helped the decision.

Instead, the park has become the fortress for a week, as Lahore's entire constabulary busses down to the Bagh to set up a concentric ring of checkpoints from the garden gates to the ground itself. There's something rather surreal about finding an airport metal detector in the middle of a public park. Especially when it is still encased in the shrink-wrap it arrived in and, moreover, is being completely ignored as an army of friskers pat down the pockets of the curious denizens of Lahore. Power-supply issues, unsurprisingly, meant that most of these detectors were standing quietly to one side - proud, erect and unquestionably obsolete, like the ceremonial guards outside Buckingham Palace.

The practicalities of outground cricket don't just affect the security arrangements, however - they also fill the travelling media with dread. In Bangladesh two winters ago, a three-day match took place at the BKSP, some 45 minutes from the centre of Dhaka. While the crowds on the opposite bank stampeded at the sight of a cobra, the press looked on from beneath a canvas on the flat roof of the pavilion. It was only thanks to the man from the BBC and his industrial-length power cable, which he fed through a sash window in the player's toilets, that anyone's laptops were able to last the day.

Happily for the media stress levels, there were no such problems to report at the Bagh. After enduring some petty criticism in the local media for their apparent lack of facilities at Rawalpindi, the Pakistan Cricket Board was taking no chances. This time they had arranged not only power, but four banks of computers and internet facilities as well. The upshot was an exhaustive warren of wires that zigzagged all through the press tent and sent roughly one passer-by in four flying headlong towards the turf. It was just another example of the faultless hospitality that Pakistanis are willing to lay on. But no-one dared imagine what on earth would have happened had it rained.

Saturday November 5

The Hotel National on Abbott Road serves my purposes very nicely. It is central and spacious, boasting cable TV and a phoneline, a fridge, a desk and a sofa. The bed has proven very comfortable in my two nights to date, and the air-conditioning has not yet leaked on my laptop. It is perhaps a little musty in places, while the cistern is liable to flood the bathroom if I forget to turn the tap off at the mains, but for the price and the positioning - a five-minute amble from Bagh-e-Jinnah - I couldn't really ask for much more.

There's only one problem though. That goddamn miaowing sound.

You see, I'm convinced there's been a cat in my cupboard ever since I arrived. At ten-minute intervals, by day and by night, my equilibrium has been disturbed by a rhythmic and plaintive mewing, like a tired farmhand turning a rusty mill-wheel in the dead of night. I've climbed out of bed at 3 o'clock in the morning to re-investigate an already barren wardrobe; I've then ignored the same whinging one hour later, convincing myself it's just some mechanical glitch in the overhead fans.

What I couldn't ignore, however, was the maniacal clawing and scrabbling at my window this evening, as the phantom moggy finally deigned to make an appearance.

Ding dong bell, pussy wasn't quite down the well - but given its actual predicament, it might have wished it was. After two days, possibly more, of sitting and starving on a fourth-floor window ledge, the cat - a rather fetching ginger tom - was now trying to squeeze its head and front paws through the metal grille on my window. The obvious flaw in its plan, however, was that the grille had been put there for precisely that reason - to stop.. err... cat burglars from getting into my room.

I seem to be attracting these situations. Last season, I was watching Sussex take on Surrey at The Oval when a fox starting trotting around the top of the great Kennington gasometer. Now I was faced with a cat in a flap, and in both cases there seemed no obvious resolution. After rummaging around the contents of my room, I eventually found a metal tea-pot which I wedged next to the window frame, but the cat wasn't in much of a mood for playing The Krypton Factor, and failed to spot the slither of an opening I'd created.

There was only one thing for it. A swift Size 12 administered to the bottom corner of the grille, a scrunch of concrete dust, and there was just enough leverage to bend back the bars and free the wretched captive. Now, of course, I have a terrified fizzing bag of fleas cowering under my bed, and mewing maniacally at ten-minute intervals - not to mention a hefty bill for fixtures and fittings. Still, one step at a time, I suppose.

Friday November 4

A strange thing happened in Lahore today. The sun shone through the smog and the city remembered to breathe. The shops remained shut, the roads all but emptied, and those few rickshaw-wallahs who remained were all starched and shiny white as they showed off their brand-new shalwar kameezes. Even the goats tethered on the city's traffic islands seemed that little bit happier with life. Today, of course, was Eid.

Eid, for the uninitiated, is like Christmas and Easter all rolled into one. It's the end of the holy month of Ramzan - which means, among other things, no more fasting during the hours of daylight - and consequently it's the excuse for one big party throughout the Muslim world. Officially, this year's celebrations were to be a solemn and muted affair, in recognition of the plight of the Kashmir earthquake victims. But quite understandably, for the majority of Lahoreites, there was no passing up a chance to escape from the daily grind.

Everything stops for Eid, even England training sessions. While nets were given the heave-ho, the players instead took to the golf course to do their bit for the relief fund and compare the lengths of their newly developing moustaches. I, meanwhile, set off in a rickshaw and went to follow the crowds.

My first port of call, for no other reason than it seemed a good place to start, was to be the Lahore Museum, Kipling's Wonder House, carved in salmon-pink brickwork and situated at the top end of Lahore's main throughfare, the Mall. Instead, in the first of many bouts of miscomprehension, I ended up at the zoo. There I located roughly half the populace, the women dressed in their Sunday-best saris and the men chorusing "hellohowareyou?" as I waded towards the ticket-office. Stallholders swarmed around, attempting to sell me five-rupee bags of popcorn to feed to the monkeys, while balloon salesmen looked on ruefully, as they wondered how to pitch a five-foot inflatable giraffe to a 27-year-old white boy.

In the end I decided it was all a little too rammed - the venue for England's warm-up match was virtually next door, so there'd be plenty opportunity to return if I really really wanted to. Instead, it was back in the rickshaw, which had sensed a quick buck and was waiting for me on the off-chance (Eid, I was quickly discovering, severely compromises your prospects of a successful haggle!) and off to the old city, to visit the magnificent Badshahi Mosque.

The mosque is perhaps Pakistan's definitive image. It comprises three marbled domes and four soaring minarets of stunning simplicity but gargantuan scale. The fact that 60,000 worshippers had eased through its gates that morning gave no real clue as to the sheer magnificence of the structure. The domes that appeared so enormous as I climbed the road beneath them seemed twice the size when viewed from the top of the steps, yet such was the length of the courtyard that they still did little more than peep over the eastern wall. And the sandstone that comprised the walls and towers seemed to have a different colour for every hour of the day, from an earthy pink when the sun was at its highest to a deep foreboding crimson at dusk.

The best view of the mosque was to be obtained from the no-less-imposing Lahore Fort directly opposite the main entrance. This sprawling plateau of archeological delights is the highest point of the city, and the former stronghold of the Mughal emperors, who used to drive their elephants through the colossal Alamgir Gate and straight up into their private quarters. From here the whole of Lahore opened up beneath me, including Iqbal Park to the north, where a sprawling funfair had taken residence beneath the concrete column of the Minar-e-Pakistan, the nation's commemorative monument.

The fort was also where many of Pakistan's more active fun-seekers had chosen to spend their holiday, as they clambered up and over and round the ancient ruins, occasionally resting to refuel in the shade of one of a selection of hotpotch cafes. The one thing that did not rest, however, was their rampant curiosity and I spent the best part of two hours frantically dredging up a few ropey shards of Urdu, as an endless succession of wellwishers trotted along beside me.

I must have said "Eid Mubarak" ten thousand times if I said it once, while "Mera Urdu bahut kamzoor hai" ("My Urdu is a bit rubbish," or sentiments of that variety!) seemed a satisfactory response to anything too baffling. One chap, however, outflanked me on all fronts. His volley of questions were too painstakingly constructed to ignore, but too complex to answer clearly, and a cat's cradle of confusion ensued. By the end of it all, he had taken it upon himself to believe I was an expectant father (my mythical son, apparently, is to be christened Freddie Flintoff!) and as a result, I had been whisked away to a nearby stall to meet his friends and drink a celebratory coke!

After performing linguistic hand-stands of that magnitude, it was time to retreat to saner pastures. Such as the fun-fair, where I paid 10 rupees for a "horer" (sic) show, and waited in the dark for ten minutes listening to the sound of a loud argument backstage. Eventually, one man in a monkey suit reluctantly appeared from behind a blacked-out curtain, and started beating the walls with a whopping great stick. After two or three minutes, he stomped off whence he came, and I emerged back into the daylight blinking my incomprehension in all directions. It felt at the time like a metaphor, but then it had been a pretty long day. Even so, the only real fear in Pakistan is the fear of the unknown. Conquer that, and the rest can turn out to be pretty comical.

Thursday November 3

It can be surprisingly nippy at 5.30 in the morning, when winter is drawing in and dawn is still a good half-hour away. As I soon discovered, it is only the foolish or the foreign who step outside in just their T-shirt and jeans - half-a-dozen more sensibly-clad staff were there to see me off, as they stood around the taxi wrapped in their rough-hewn blankets and with their tribal bonnets pulled tight down over their ears.

It was daybreak by the time I'd reached the station and bought my ticket, leaving a good half-hour to doze before my train. But with Eid now just two days away, there was a festive air already permeating the platform. Entire extended families were making the journey back south to Lahore, and peace and quiet was not the order of the day. In fact, the sight of a gora making this particular journey at this particular time of the year was just too improbable for one fellow traveller. For the first, and presumably only, time in my life, I was mistaken for a Palestinian.

As we pulled out of Pindi, I had a chance to piece together the snapshots of scenery that I had been taking in for the past week. A glimpse of the Murree Road, flanked by huge mounds of rubbish that had been blown and snowploughed by the daily motion of the trains. Agitated queues of rickshaw drivers, jostling for position as they waited impatiently by the makeshift railway barriers. A phalanx of catastrophically constructed houses, balancing in gravity-defying fashion on the tops of boulders or the sides of slopes, like a Dr Seuss village.

Then slowly but surely, we inched our way out of the city, and the dust and the rubbish faded away, to be replaced by lush green plains, bored donkeys and fascinated children, for whom the regular passing of the train is an event of indescribable importance. Then the greens would turn to yellows and the yellows would fade to grey, and another arid settlement would flash by.

Four-and-a-half hours of similarly pleasant ponderings, and the ferment in the carriage intensified as the end of the journey drew nigh. The children were getting restless and rowdy, and the adults were rustling in the baggage racks, preparing themselves to make a quick getaway. "More speed less haste" is the proverb that would best describe the subcontinent. Nothing happens very quickly, but everyone is in a mad rush to do it all the same.

Perhaps, however, they had a point. Lahore City Railway Station is not a place to linger, not if you value your sanity and eardrums. Swaying under the weight of my rucksack, and choking on the noxious soup of exhaust fumes that is your constant companion in this city, I was buffeted this way and that by incoming travellers and outgoing rickshaw-wallahs, all offering extortionate, but strangely tempting, prices simply to get you the hell out of there.

I knew, however, where I wanted to be, and blocked my ears to their exhortations as I strode across the square. Located 100 yards away, in the knot of grimy hotels that have sprung up in the station precinct, was the place I was determined to frequent, if only for a night. "The Hotel Decent", it was called. I've always been a sucker for simple pleasures, but this had made me chuckle for weeks. Neither good, nor bad, but entirely indifferent, this was a chance to sample, in all its bland insipid awfulness, the most ordinary hospitality experience in existence.

Alas, I searched and searched, but the Hotel Decent was no more, lost in Lahore's permanent pea-souper, presumably confounded by its own modesty. I decided to give the Hotel Magnificent a miss, and made instead for the environs of Bagh-e-Jinnah, where England's next warm-up was due to start on Saturday.

Wednesday November 2

Rawalpindi train station is a disarmingly organised corner of an alarmingly bedlamic town. It's a vast white imperial building with great marbled halls, soaring archways and a sense of space, something that comes at a premium in the otherwise claustrophobic environs of the Saddar bazaar.

Given its history, it would have been incongruous had the largest garrison town in the subcontinent not had a station befitting its status. The railways were, after all, the instrument by which Britain controlled its empire, and the legendary ruggedness of the North-Western borders only increased the need for such a regimented structure.

It was a shock nonetheless, for nothing I had yet seen in Rawalpindi came close to matching these levels of decorum. Kept cool by the vast banks of pankhas hanging from the ceiling, there were smartly-dressed porters to-ing and fro-ing across the platform, balancing enormous suitcases on their heads, while gaggles of old women stood around their belongings, awaiting their cue to board.

And on the massive LED display boards that would put most British stations to shame, a series of wonderfully evocative trains were announced - the Khyber Mail and the Quetta Express among them - their majesty matched by the relic of the Steam Age that had been mounted on a plinth and positioned in the car-park outside.

Thanks to the early completion of England's warm-up fixture, I had decided to kill an hour or two by sizing up my options for tomorrow's trek south to Lahore. My journey from the stadium plunged me deep into the grubby heart of Rawalpindi, through the back-streets of the Rajah Bazaar, a district that is thick with the sound and smell of thousands of caged birds.

There is an advert doing the rounds on the cable networks at present, in which Richard Gere, no less, uses his gold card to fulfil the wish of a little girl whose brother is going on a journey. Freeing a caged bird is an act that brings good luck, apparently, and so Gere uses his financial clout to ensure the brother will come up smelling of roses for the rest of his days.

It's a three-minute feelgood tale, but even Gere's riches would be hard-pressed to liberate all the avian residents of the Rajah Bazaar. Green parrots - usually dozens to a perch - chickens, doves, geese and even African Greys, all crammed into the tiniest and grottiest of spaces. It's an area where bird flu fears to tread, and it's certainly not an area for the squeamish.

By now the sun is setting and the Azan is sounding from each of the myriad of minarets in the district, the prayers rising and ebbing like the siren of a passing ambulance, as the baton is passed from one mosque to the next. In every passing stall, the workers are down on their hunkers, tucking into their iftar as all business comes to a grinding halt.

Unfortunately, that is also true of the ticket office at the station. The train I am after is the Subak Kharam. "Come back at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning," I am told between mouthfuls. It looks like it's going to be a long day on the road.

Tuesday November 1

The speed with which darkness descends in the subcontinent never fails to astound. On days such as these, when a late England capitulation forces a last-ditch rewrite, it is inevitably pitch-black by the time I've filed my final dispatch. And yet, for all that you might imagine that the stadium is as empty and eery as it appears by day, the exact opposite is true. In Ramzan, the town comes to life when the lights go out.

And it is life of all shapes and sizes that plays a part in the atmospherics. The press box, it turns out, is home to an inquisitive gecko and a pair of distressed bats (of the furry mammalian variety, I hasten to add, rather than that currently belonging to Geraint Jones). These have emerged, quite literally, from the woodwork since the sun went down, awoken in all probability by the strains of the Azan sounding out from the nearby Mosques.

That call to prayer, already so familiar, is the signal for a long hard day of fasting to come to an end. In the communications room on the level below, the support staff spread their iftar like a picnic across the floor, as phone cables and unwired plugs intermingle with samosas and squishy brown dates. I tread gingerly as I stretch for the internet connection beyond, already embarrassed to be interrupting such an urgent part of their day.

Meanwhile, on the concourse outside the ground, hardly noticeable in the heat-stroked hush of the day, a transformation has taken place. Upon arrival first thing in the morning, this dust-choked dirt-track is little more than an adjunct to the grimy main road beyond, although a row of boarded-up huts along its edge does give a hint as to a possible dual identity. Sure enough, by night, the shutters are raised and the "Pindi Fortress Food Street" is born.

The huts are in fact a bit of a red herring - the real jewels of this fortress are embedded in the base of the stadium's concrete stands. With a sprinkling of fairy lights and a range of barbeques teasing the air with the choicest of odours, these obsolete caverns have been turned into a series of high-class restaurants. Big bright neon signs are testament to their permanence, although a pile of scaffolding poles and a large industrial polisher are proof of their incompletion. Come the two one-day internationals in the final week before Christmas, however, and the hungry hordes can expect to be fully catered for.

Monday October 31

Three men and a dog gathered in Rawalpindi's dusty concrete bowl to watch the first day proper of England's tour of Pakistan. Well, I exaggerate a fraction. The dog was barred entry (presumably it was deemed a security risk), and though the attendance was pitiful at first, it swelled a fraction after lunch as news of England's discomfort filtered through the city.

There was never any danger that crowd would outnumber concrete, however. Pakistanis simply don't get out of bed for anything more than 50 overs a side. Not even the seminal Test series against India last year was deemed historic enough to drag the punters through the turnstiles, and amid all the fuss about Karachi being deprived of a Test on this tour, it is generally forgotten that England's victory in the twilight in December 2000 was witnessed by a crowd of approximately 12.

Generations of turgid tracks and safety-first attitudes, not to mention the bad-light issues that invariably rob precious overs from a day's play. These have all conspired to produce 17 draws in the 21 Tests that England have played in Pakistan, and as the team so heroically demonstrated by hurtling to 60 for 6 today, not even the most confident, Ashes-winning world-beaters can beat the prevailing conditions by flinging a bat at them and hoping for the best.

If England thought the empty stands would translate into a quiet start to their tour, then they were obviously overlooking the Pindi factor. The ground is a fair distance out of town, as close to Islamabad's centre as its own, but there is no doubt in whose image it has been created. Chaos reigns at this venue - especially, it seems, when England come to play.

Trescothick's last innings at Pindi is a case in point. Back then, it was not reverse swing or a sluggish outfield that proved his greatest obstacle, but the rather more ephemeral hazard of tear gas. Thanks to the ingenious policy of selling the same match tickets in both Rawalpindi and Islamabad, half the punters who arrived at the gates for the third and final one-day international were denied entry. Three hours of rioting later, Trescothick and Alec Stewart were forced to hit the ground with handkerchiefs over their noses, while the Rawalpindi police force attempted to dispel the disenchanted hordes in the most perfunctory manner possible.

Stewart, meanwhile, had a separate reason to blot Rawalpindi out of his memory. It was during this very same fixture on the 2000 tour that he was implicated in the Indian CBI's report into match-fixing. Stewart pleaded his innocence, very calmly, during a live press conference at the Pearl Continental Hotel, and after several weeks of suspicion and speculation, the issue was eventually forgotten. So, too, was a screening of "Carry On Up the Khyber", that had been scheduled for the same evening that the story broke. Perhaps that joy awaits this time around instead.