A few days ago in London I was flipping through my morning paper when I came upon a picture of a gleaming new cricket ground. ‘Dubai to provide cricket’s new oasis’ the headline said.

I already knew, of course, that there would be no international cricket played in Pakistan in the forseeable future following on from the attack on the Sri Lankan cricketers in Lahore, and it didn’t take any act of genius to forecast that the Gulf states, with their large Pakistani (not to mention Indian and Bangladeshi) populations and available cricket ground, would become the alternative venue. Even so, to be confronted with pictures of the closest thing Pakistan would soon have to a ‘home ground’ moved me to a state of melancholy. I found myself thinking of the status update on a friend’s Facebook page which declared she was “already missing the sound of plastic bottles hitting stadium chairs.” There are, of course, plastic bottles in Dubai, and Pakistanis enough there who will know that the true sound of cricket spectatorship, particularly during ODI’s, is not cheering or applauding but the thwacking of those empty bottles against the backs of chairs. But even so, there is a sadness to outsourcing that noise, that jubilation. It is a sadness so visceral that it does not even detour via the logical pathways of the brain — the ones that ask questions such as: how will the tickets be priced — will there be relatively affordable stands or will all but the wealthiest be priced out of spectatorship as is the case with international matches at venues such as Lords?

... contd.