Multan Cricket Stadium: Pitch and Records

For a ground that has been open only since 2001, Multan Cricket Stadium has an unusually long list of extremes attached to it. The first Indian Test triple century was made here. So was one of the largest Test innings totals ever compiled. A Test was won here from 144 runs behind on first innings, and another was won with two spinners taking all twenty wickets between them. Nothing about the place is moderate, and neither is the weather.

The stadium sits off Vehari Road on the edge of the city, replacing the old Ibn-e-Qasim Bagh Stadium in the centre, which had staged Multan's earlier first-class and international cricket in a converted municipal park. Published capacity figures for the new ground sit in the low thirty-thousands, and the enclosures are named after Pakistani cricketers rather than sponsors: Fazal Mahmood, Zaheer Abbas, Javed Miandad, Imran Khan, Waqar Younis and Inzamam-ul-Haq.

That last name matters locally more than the rest. Inzamam is Multan's own, and for the better part of two decades he was the reason a city of this size expected to be on the international map at all.

Opened in 2001, and immediately in use

Test cricket began at the ground in late August 2001, when Pakistan played Bangladesh there over three days as part of the Asian Test Championship. It was Bangladesh's first Test in Pakistan and it did not last long.

The ground then spent its first decade taking the sort of fixture list that a second-tier Pakistani venue gets: a Test or a one-day international when the itinerary allowed, domestic cricket the rest of the time. Floodlights came later, and the first day-night match under them was played in February 2006.

None of that would make the ground notable. Two Tests in the middle of that first decade did.

March 2004: Sehwag's 309, and a declaration nobody expected

India's tour of Pakistan in 2003-04 was the first full bilateral series between the countries in years and its first Test was at Multan, starting on 28 March 2004.

Virender Sehwag made 309 from 375 balls. It was the first Test triple century by an India batter, and one of the fastest ever made by anyone. India declared on 675 for 5. Pakistan replied with 407, Mohammad Yousuf making 112, and India won by an innings and 52 runs — their first Test victory on Pakistani soil.

The match is remembered in India for a second reason. Rahul Dravid, captaining in Sourav Ganguly's absence, declared the innings with Sachin Tendulkar unbeaten on 194. Tendulkar said afterwards that he had been surprised and was disappointed; a number of former players said publicly that the declaration was in poor taste; Dravid said the matter had been discussed within the side and settled. It has never entirely stopped being discussed outside it.

The bare result mattered too. India went on to win the series 2-1, taking the third Test at Rawalpindi by an innings and 131 after Pakistan had levelled at Lahore.

November 2005: won from 144 behind

The other Test worth knowing about from that period is the reverse case: a home win Pakistan had no business getting.

England arrived in November 2005 as the newly minted Ashes winners and played the first Test at Multan. Pakistan made 274. England replied with 418, Marcus Trescothick making 193, and led by 144. Pakistan then made 341 in the second innings, Salman Butt scoring 122 after 74 in the first, which left England needing 198 to win.

England were bowled out for 175 and lost by 22 runs. Andrew Flintoff had taken four wickets in each innings and still finished on the losing side. It set the tone for a series Pakistan won, and it is the match that established Multan's reputation as a ground where a first-innings lead guarantees nothing, because the surface changes character between the second day and the fourth.

Fourteen years of domestic cricket only

After the 2009 attack on the Sri Lanka team in Lahore, Pakistan lost its international cricket entirely. Multan had already fallen off the international schedule before that, and when the game began returning to the country the process was slow and centre-by-centre, starting at Gaddafi Stadium and then Karachi and Rawalpindi.

Multan waited about fourteen years. International cricket resumed here in June 2022, when the West Indies played one-day internationals at the ground, and Test cricket followed in December of the same year with the second Test of England's tour. That match was won by England by 26 runs — Harry Brook made 108 in the second innings and Abrar Ahmed, on debut in the series, took seven wickets in an England innings — and again the margin was tiny on a pitch that had changed underneath both sides.

The following year the ground hosted the opening match of the 2023 Asia Cup, on 30 August: Pakistan made 342 for 6 against Nepal, with Babar Azam scoring 151 and Iftikhar Ahmed his first one-day international century, and Nepal were bowled out for 104. The broader story of the competition is in the guide to Pakistan at the Asia Cup.

October 2024: 823 for 7, then no seamers at all

The two Tests England played at Multan within eight days in October 2024 are the strangest pair of matches at any Pakistani ground, and possibly at any ground.

In the first, from 7 October, Pakistan made 556 batting first and lost by an innings and 47 runs. England replied with 823 for 7 declared. Harry Brook made 317 from 322 balls, and Joe Root 262 from 375, the two of them adding 454 together — the highest partnership for any wicket by an England pair. Root passed Alastair Cook as England's leading Test run-scorer during the innings. Pakistan were then bowled out for 220. It was the highest total made in a Test in Pakistan and among the highest made anywhere.

Pakistan's response, in the second Test starting on 15 October, was to change the surface rather than the side. They played on a pitch prepared to take spin from the first session and used no seam bowler at all in England's first innings, which had not happened in a Test since 1882. Sajid Khan took seven for 111; Noman Ali took eight for 46 in the second innings. Sajid bowls off-spin and Noman left-arm spin, and between them they took all twenty English wickets, the first bowling pair to do that in a Test since Dennis Lillee and Bob Massie in 1972. Pakistan won by 152 runs and then won the third Test at Rawalpindi to take the series.

Match	Date	Result
Pakistan v Bangladesh	August 2001	First Test at the ground
India v Pakistan	March 2004	India won by an innings and 52 runs
Pakistan v England	November 2005	Pakistan won by 22 runs
Pakistan v England	December 2022	England won by 26 runs
Pakistan v Nepal	August 2023	Pakistan won by 238 runs
Pakistan v England	October 2024	England won by an innings and 47 runs
Pakistan v England	October 2024	Pakistan won by 152 runs

The heat, and what the pitch does with it

Multan is one of the hottest cities in Pakistan. Summer temperatures make cricket impractical for months, and even in the shoulder seasons an afternoon session here is physically punishing in a way that Lahore's is not. That is not incidental to the cricket: it dictates when the ground can be used, it shortens the spells fast bowlers can sustain, and it dries the square fast.

The surface is generally slow and low. New-ball movement is limited and rarely lasts, which is why first-innings totals here can be very large. What changes is the second half of a match. The square breaks up, footholes deepen, the ball starts gripping, and a side batting fourth is playing a different game from the one that batted first. The 22-run Test of 2005 and the 26-run Test of 2022 were both won by the team that handled that transition better rather than by the team that batted best on day one.

There is a further consequence, which is what the ground does to selection. A visiting side picking a squad for Multan has to decide whether it is preparing for the first two days or the last two, and those require different teams. England's answer in 2024 was to bat as if the pitch would never change, which worked once and then did not. Pakistan's answer was to drop their frontline seamers entirely for the second match, which is an option almost no other Test nation would consider and which this ground makes rational.

The 2024 pair showed the two extremes available. Prepare the surface as a batting pitch and you get 823 for 7. Prepare it as a turner and you get twenty wickets to two spinners inside four days. Curators here have more control over the outcome than at most Test grounds, which is a point in favour of the venue if you like matches with a result, and against it if you would rather the pitch were neutral.

In white-ball cricket the ground reads flat. Totals of 180 and above are routine in the Pakistan Super League, and dew in evening matches under lights tends to favour the side chasing.

Multan Sultans, and a home crowd that arrived late

The city got its own franchise in 2017, when Multan Sultans were added as the Pakistan Super League's sixth team, but for their first seasons they had no home cricket at all, because the tournament was being played outside Pakistan. Their first PSL match at Multan Cricket Stadium was in February 2020, against Peshawar Zalmi.

The Sultans have been one of the league's more consistent sides since. They won the title in 2021, beating Peshawar Zalmi in the final, and Mohammad Rizwan captained them for most of the following seasons. Full details of the franchises are in the guide to the PSL teams.

There is a real argument that the ground has been better served by the league than by the international calendar. A PSL season guarantees Multan a block of full houses; an international itinerary has historically given the city one fixture every few years, or none.

Going to a match

The stadium is a short drive from central Multan, on the Vehari Road side of the city, and taxis or ride-hailing are the practical way in; parking near the ground on a match day is difficult. Tickets for internationals and PSL fixtures are sold through the board's official ticketing channels and at designated physical outlets, and a Sultans home match or a Pakistan Test will sell out.

Take a hat and take more water than you think you need — the shaded enclosures are worth paying for, and the difference between a covered seat and an open one at this ground in October is not a matter of comfort but of endurance. Security screening is thorough, so allow well over an hour before the first ball.

For comparisons with the country's other venues see the guide to Pakistan's cricket grounds, and for everything else — the domestic structure, the national side, the tournaments — start at the cricket in Pakistan hub.

Sources and method

This page is assembled from the ground's published match records, series records for the 2004 India tour, the 2005-06 and 2022-23 and 2024-25 England tours, the 2023 Asia Cup schedule and results, and Pakistan Super League records for Multan Sultans. Capacity is given as a range because the published figure differs between official sources. Pitch behaviour is described from the results of matches played there and from contemporary reporting, not from any dataset held by us; no figure on this page has been computed here.