Neutral Venue History: How the UAE Became Cricket's Hub

There is no cricketing tradition here in the sense the phrase usually carries. No village game, no colonial club network, no school competition running back a century, no first-class structure, no Test side. And yet for four decades, whenever the sport has needed somewhere to play that was not anybody's home, the answer has been the same stretch of coast.

Pakistan spent a decade calling it home. The ICC calls it head office. Afghanistan used it as a base. The IPL moved there twice and a Twenty20 World Cup relocated there once. That is a remarkable amount of consequence for a place that has never produced a Test cricketer.

It started with one man and a benefit fund

The origin is specific and personal. Abdulrahman Bukhatir, a businessman from Sharjah who had been educated in Pakistan and fallen for the game there, built a cricket ground in his home emirate at the start of the 1980s. He then had to find something to put on it.

He had watched the game take hold in a country where it arrived with the British and stayed, a story told in the guide to the origins of cricket in Pakistan, and he wanted a piece of it at home.

His answer was the Cricketers Benefit Fund Series. The idea was to stage short one-day tournaments involving the leading subcontinental sides and use the proceeds to make benefit payments to retired cricketers, many of whom had played long international careers in an era that paid almost nothing and had retired into difficulty. The players honoured at those ceremonies were legends of the game receiving, in some cases, the first significant money cricket had ever given them.

Internationals began in 1984, when the ground hosted the first Asia Cup. Within a few years the format had settled into something the calendar had not seen before: a compact tournament of three or four teams, played over a fortnight, on neutral ground, for prize money, with no bearing on any series or championship. It was cricket as an event rather than cricket as a season.

Why it worked immediately

Four things came together, and none of them was luck.

The audience was already there. Hundreds of thousands of Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and Bangladeshi workers lived within an hour of the ground, most of them cricket-mad, most of them with no prospect of seeing their national side at home. A Sharjah tournament was, for a very large number of people, the only live international cricket they would ever attend.

The geography was ideal. Roughly equidistant from the subcontinent and Europe, in a time zone that let a day match be broadcast live into evening viewing in India and Pakistan.

The climate cooperated. The season here runs through the northern winter, which is precisely when the subcontinental season runs and precisely when the English and Australian ones do not.

And the politics worked. India and Pakistan could not reliably play each other at home. On neutral ground, with neutral officials and a crowd drawn from both communities, they could. Sharjah became the venue where that fixture actually happened, over and over, and the commercial value of it underwrote everything else. The rivalry's long history is set out in the guides to Pakistan's cricket history and cricket in India.

The single most famous ball

April 1986, the final of the Austral-Asia Cup. Pakistan needed four from the last delivery, Javed Miandad hit Chetan Sharma over the boundary, and a tournament in a small Gulf emirate produced one of the most replayed moments in the sport's history. Nothing did more to establish the venue's reputation. For a generation of viewers on both sides of that rivalry, Sharjah was where the important things happened.

What the inquiries found

The tournaments of the 1990s attracted a second kind of attention, and the record here should be stated plainly rather than glossed.

Illegal betting markets on cricket were large and active across South Asia and the Gulf during that decade, and bookmakers operated around the neutral tournaments in particular. When the match-fixing scandals broke at the end of the 1990s, the resulting investigations examined matches played at Sharjah among others.

In Pakistan, the judicial inquiry conducted by Justice Malik Qayyum reported at the end of the decade and recommended sanctions against several international players. In India, the Central Bureau of Investigation published a report in 2000 into match fixing and related malpractice, which named players and recorded allegations concerning matches including those played at neutral venues. National boards subsequently imposed bans and fines on a number of cricketers across several countries.

The direct consequence for the venue was that India stopped going. The Indian board withdrew from the Sharjah tournaments after 2000, and without the largest draw in the sport the model that had sustained the ground for sixteen years collapsed. International cricket at Sharjah dried up in the early 2000s and did not return in volume for years.

What the inquiries did not establish was any wrongdoing by the ground or its organisers. The venue was where a great deal of cricket was played during a period when a great deal of cricket was compromised, and the two facts are related without being the same fact.

The second act: institutions rather than tournaments

The recovery, when it came, was built on something more durable than a tournament series.

In 2005 the International Cricket Council moved its headquarters from London to Dubai. The stated reasons were commercial and logistical: a central location for a global membership, a favourable tax position, and a modern city with the flights to support constant travel. Whatever the balance of motives, the effect was to put the sport's administrative centre in a country with almost no playing tradition, permanently. The ICC's own academy facility followed, giving the region a serious training venue with turf squares and coaching accreditation.

Two new grounds arrived either side of that move. Abu Dhabi opened its stadium in the mid-2000s and Dubai opened its own at the end of the decade, both to a specification that could host Test cricket. A country that had one usable international venue in 2000 had three by 2010.

Pakistan moves in

Then came the event that changed everything. After the attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore in March 2009, international sides stopped touring Pakistan. The Pakistan Cricket Board needed somewhere to play its home fixtures, and it needed somewhere that visiting teams would agree to go.

For close to a decade, that was here. Pakistan played home Tests, one-day internationals and Twenty20 matches at Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, hosting every major nation, and did it with a home record that was genuinely formidable. The full account of that period, what it produced and what it cost, is in the guide to Pakistan's home series in exile.

Afghanistan's rise ran along a parallel track. A side with no secure home ground of international standard used the Emirati stadiums, along with venues in India, as a base for "home" fixtures during the years it was climbing towards full membership. Sharjah in particular staged a great deal of Afghan cricket.

By the middle of the 2010s the country had become something the sport had never had before: a permanent, institutional neutral venue with the stadiums, the officials, the curators and the hotel capacity to absorb somebody else's entire international season at short notice.

Relocation on demand

That capacity got tested repeatedly, and it held.

Event	Reason for relocating	Scale
IPL 2014, opening phase	Indian general election, security forces committed elsewhere	20 matches across the three grounds
Pakistan Super League, mid-2010s	Domestic security situation	Most of several full seasons
Asia Cup, 2018 and 2022	Host-nation politics and scheduling	Full tournaments
IPL 2020	Covid-19 conditions in India	Entire 60-match season
IPL 2021, second phase	Season suspended mid-way in India	31 matches
Men's T20 World Cup 2021	Covid-19 conditions in the host nation	Tournament relocated, shared with Oman

The 2020 season is the clearest illustration. An entire Indian Premier League, sixty matches over eight weeks, moved country and was delivered without a single fixture lost. Our own ball-by-ball analysis of what those seasons did to the cricket is in the guide to the IPL's Emirates seasons.

No other cricketing country could have absorbed that. Most could not host a bilateral series at short notice, let alone a global tournament.

What it has cost the local game

The bill is real, and it is mostly about attention.

A board whose grounds are constantly booked by other people has less room for its own cricket. Domestic competition here has always been scheduled around whatever international or franchise tournament is in residence, and the national side has spent forty years as the least important cricket played in its own country. When a stadium is available, the fixture that fills it is somebody else's.

There is a reputational cost too. The country is known in the sport as a venue rather than as a team. That framing is hard to shift, and it shapes how the associate side is covered, funded and taken seriously. The structural problems underneath, which are largely about a transient playing population, are set out in the guide to how the Emirates Cricket Board is organised.

And the atmosphere has been uneven. Neutral Test cricket in front of a few hundred spectators is a strange and slightly sad spectacle, and this is where most of it has been played this century. A venue can be the right choice logistically and still produce cricket that feels like it is happening in a vacuum.

What it has given

Rather more than the criticism usually allows.

Infrastructure, first. Three floodlit international grounds, a serious academy, and turf squares maintained to a standard that most associate nations cannot approach. None of that would exist if the country's only cricketing purpose had been its own national side. Those grounds are described individually in the guide to the three stadiums.

Expertise, second. Curators, groundstaff, match officials, analysts, physiotherapists and administrators who have worked hundreds of international days. That is a professional cricketing workforce, built in a country that produced no cricketers.

Access, third. Generations of children here have watched the best players in the sport, live, twenty minutes from home. That is a form of exposure available in almost no other associate nation, and it is the single most plausible route to a domestic playing culture that does not depend on imported adults.

And most recently, ownership. The International League T20 means that for the first time the stadiums are hosting a competition the local board runs rather than a competition it rents out. That is a different relationship with the sport, and the wider franchise landscape it belongs to is mapped in the survey of leagues around the world.

The honest summary

A place with no claim on the game became indispensable to it, because it turned out that what international cricket most needed at several critical moments was not tradition but a functioning stadium, a visa on arrival, a flight from anywhere, and a board willing to say yes at short notice.

Whether the local game grows into that inheritance is still open. The infrastructure is decades ahead of the playing base, which is the exact inverse of the problem most cricketing nations have. Comparable structures elsewhere are collected in the cricket around the world overview, the players who built their records on these grounds are in the player index, and everything else on the region sits on the hub.

Sources and method

This account draws on published international scorecards and venue records, the reporting of the Cricketers Benefit Fund Series tournaments, the published findings of the Qayyum inquiry in Pakistan and the Central Bureau of Investigation's 2000 report in India, ICC announcements regarding its headquarters and tournament relocations, and board statements on relocated series and seasons. Match and scoring figures described as ours are computed from our own ball-by-ball database. Where a date, figure or attribution could not be confirmed against a primary source, it is described qualitatively.