Postcard From Pakistan: Deserted - the stage where Viv and Sylvester caused havoc

The Qasim Bagh Stadium lies disused and neglected now. Its high tiers of concrete seating are cracking up, the walls are crumbling, the entrance gates have lost hinges and the outfield is no more than scrub. Yet on the eve of the Test match it was a hive of cricket activity. On what used to be the business area, two games of cricket were being conducted (in one of them your reporter adjudicated in favour of the batsman when a stumping appeal was made, and was immediately mobbed by the fielding side). On the outfield, another five similarly disorganised yet organised games were taking place. There was still also place for a less populated football match. This stadium was the venue for one Test match, in December and January 1980-81. Imran Khan took five West Indies wickets and Viv Richards scored the 11th of his 24 Test hundreds, but that is not the reason it holds a place in the memory. On the second day, Sylvester Clarke, the West Indies fast bowler (above), became fed up with being pelted by fruit and pebbles on the boundary. He picked up a brick being used as a boundary marker and hurled it into the crowd, where it struck and injured a local student leader. Play was held up for 25 minutes, and resumed only when the West Indies captain, Alvin Kallicharran, went down on bended knee before the crowd. Clarke played only one more Test.

In the shadows, some food for fort

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The Qasim Bagh Stadium is part of what used to be the Qasim Bagh Fort. This was largely destroyed in 1848 by Britain as she was still building her empire. An obelisk in the stadium's shadow marks the spot where the remains of Lieutenants Patrick Alexander vans Agnew and William Anderson are buried. They were murdered by Sikh soldiers they had putatively arrived to help. The inscription on the obelisk pays tribute to their high hopes, rare talent and promise of usefulness. Some nine months later their deaths were avenged, much of the 900-year-old fort having been destroyed, when their bodies were borne to the spot. "The annexation of the Punjab to the Empire was the result of the war to which their assassinations were the commencement," says the obelisk. It is as well occasionally to have such tutorials to remind us (and any English cricketers lest they ask) why England play in such places as Multan.

When the joke was on the umpire

Incidentally, two English teams have played at the Qasim Bagh Stadium before. Fifty years ago, before Nasser Hussain's England A team of 1996, Donald Carr's ill-starred MCC A team played their penultimate fixture at the ground and won by an innings and 23 runs, with Tony Lock taking nine wickets. They were lucky to get that far, since in a previous match at Peshawar the England team had played a practical joke on the umpire Idris Bagh in which a bucket of water, placed on top of an open door, was tipped over him. Billy Bowden, standing in this match, might appreciate the jape.

The great giveaway Test of 2005

This is the fifth Test at the new stadium, 30 minutes outside town - 20 if you have a police escort like we reporters, which is making us more self-important than ever. During the fourth, Virender Sehwag, of India, made 309 and was watched by fewer spectators than he made runs. The ground manager, Lt Col Mansoor Saeed (rtd), blames an officious police presence. He hopes to have circumvented it this time by having given away 10,000 tickets.

Fletcher hidden by translation

England's coach, Duncan Fletcher, wondered why he was being so closely attended by two armed guards on arrival in Multan. Two of the few English words which the soldiers in question understood were "autograph" and "protection". When both were uttered as they were given their detail for the day, they assumed they had to protect others from Fletcher's autograph-seeking. They have now backed off slightly.