Pakistan's Home Series in the UAE: The Exiled Decade

On the morning of 3 March 2009, the bus carrying the Sri Lanka team to the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore for the third day of a Test match was attacked by gunmen at the Liberty roundabout. Several players were injured. Police officers and civilians were killed. The Test was abandoned, the tourists flew home, and international cricket in Pakistan stopped for a decade.

What followed was without precedent in the sport. A full member of the ICC, one of the game's founding cricketing cultures, played its home fixtures in another country for ten years. Not one series. Not one tournament. A whole decade of home cricket, hosted at three grounds roughly two thousand kilometres from Lahore, in front of crowds that on many days could be counted from the pavilion.

Why the Emirates

The Pakistan Cricket Board's problem after 2009 was not finding a stadium. It was finding a stadium that visiting teams and their players' associations would agree to travel to.

The first attempt was England. A "home" series against Australia in 2010 was played at Lord's and Headingley, which worked once and was never going to be sustainable. English grounds are booked years ahead, English weather is hostile to a Pakistani home advantage, and the costs were enormous.

The Gulf offered everything England did not. Three international grounds with turf squares and floodlights. A short flight from Karachi. A South Asian population in the millions, which meant at least the possibility of a crowd. Established relations between the boards. Visas that were straightforward for touring squads and for the officials, broadcasters and support staff who travel with them. And, crucially, pitches that behaved something like Pakistani pitches, which meant a home side could still be a home side.

The country had spent a quarter of a century becoming the sport's default neutral ground, a history covered in the neutral venue guide. In 2009 that infrastructure was already there and largely idle. Pakistan moved in.

What a home Test actually looked like

Strange, is the honest answer. Strange in ways that took years to stop being remarked upon.

A Test match would start at ten in the morning under a hard white sky. The stands would be almost entirely empty. Camera operators framed shots to avoid the seating. On the better-attended days a few thousand would come, most of them Pakistani expatriates who had taken leave from work; on ordinary weekdays the attendance was in the hundreds, and the sound of the ball on the bat carried to the top of the stand.

The board tried to fix it. Tickets were given away. Buses were laid on from labour accommodation. Schools were invited. Some of it worked at weekends and for one-day internationals, which drew properly. Test cricket did not, and it was never realistic that it would. The people who fill a Test ground are people who can arrange their week around one, and the audience here was largely made up of people working six-day weeks.

Players spoke about it consistently. Winning a home series and hearing almost nothing. Taking a five-wicket haul in front of empty plastic. Celebrating a hundred to a scattering of applause. Home advantage without a home.

The pink-ball experiment

The most creative response was to move the cricket to the evening. In October 2016, Dubai staged a day-night Test against West Indies, the first played in Asia and Pakistan's first anywhere. The reasoning was simple: if the audience cannot come at ten in the morning, start at two in the afternoon and finish under the ring of light.

It helped, marginally. It did not solve the problem, and it introduced its own complications with dew and with a pink ball nobody had much experience of. But it was a genuine attempt to redesign a format around a broken circumstance, and Test cricket's wider adoption of day-night matches owes something to what was learned at that ground.

The results

Here is the part that gets underplayed. Pakistan were formidable in exile.

A side with no crowd, no home ground and no continuity of venue built one of the most effective home records of the era, on surfaces it learned faster than anyone else could. The pattern was consistent: slow pitches, a first innings that established control, and two or three spinners with different methods working at a batting side across the fourth and fifth days.

England, 2011-12

The result that announced it. England arrived as the top-ranked Test side in the world, fresh from beating India and Australia, and were beaten 3-0. Saeed Ajmal was close to unplayable, with Abdur Rehman working from the other end. In Abu Dhabi, England were bowled out for 72 chasing a modest fourth-innings target, one of the more startling collapses of the decade.

Saeed Ajmal took wickets in that series at a rate that made a strong England batting order look like it had never faced spin. It remains one of the great whitewashes.

Australia, 2014

Pakistan won 2-0. Misbah-ul-Haq reached a hundred off 56 balls in Abu Dhabi, equalling the fastest Test century on record, which was not a thing anyone expected from a captain whose public reputation was built on obduracy. Younis Khan scored heavily across the series, as he did across the whole decade.

England again, 2015

Pakistan won 2-0 in a three-match series, this time with Yasir Shah as the primary weapon rather than Ajmal. Different bowler, same outcome. England had prepared specifically for these conditions and were beaten in them again.

The shape of the decade, in the Test results that mattered most:

Series	Outcome	What it turned on
England, 2011-12	Pakistan won 3-0	Saeed Ajmal and Abdur Rehman against a top-ranked side with no answer to spin
Australia, 2014	Pakistan won 2-0	Misbah's 56-ball hundred and a huge series from Younis Khan
England, 2015	Pakistan won 2-0	Yasir Shah, and batting that made first innings enormous
Australia, 2018	Pakistan won 1-0	A drawn first Test in Dubai, then a heavy win in Abu Dhabi
New Zealand, 2018	New Zealand won 2-1	A four-run defence in Abu Dhabi that ended the aura

The run ends

In August 2016 Pakistan reached the top of the Test rankings for the first time, a position built almost entirely on results at these grounds. Two years later the home fortress cracked. New Zealand won a series here in late 2018, taking the first Test in Abu Dhabi by four runs after defending a target of well under two hundred, and holding on to win 2-1. It was the first time a visiting side had properly solved the conditions.

By then Pakistan's cricket had already begun to go home.

The players the decade produced

An entire generation of Pakistani cricketers played their whole home career in another country.

Younis Khan became his country's leading Test run-scorer and passed 10,000 Test runs during this period. Misbah-ul-Haq captained through almost all of it and turned a side in crisis into the world's best-ranked Test team. Yasir Shah reached 200 Test wickets faster than any bowler in the history of the game, and did it here. Mohammad Hafeez and Shoaib Malik spent years as the fixed points of white-ball sides that changed constantly around them.

The cost to them was different from the cost to the board. These were players who never got a home Test hundred in front of their own crowd, never had a home ground in the sense that a Yorkshire player has Headingley, and finished careers of enormous distinction without their families in the stands. The longer arc of that generation sits inside the broader story told in Pakistan's cricket history, which runs back to the game's arrival on the subcontinent, traced in the guide to the origins of cricket in Pakistan.

The money

The financial side was the quiet catastrophe.

A home series is supposed to be a revenue event. The host board sells tickets, sells in-stadium advertising, sells hospitality, and keeps the domestic broadcast rights for a product being consumed in its own market at a convenient hour. Almost all of that was compromised.

Ticket income was negligible. Venue hire had to be paid in a foreign currency to a foreign board. Squads, officials, support staff and administrators had to be flown out and accommodated for the duration of a series rather than bussed between home cities. Sponsorship inventory was harder to sell because the stands behind it were empty. Broadcast rights held up better than anything else, because the audience watching in Pakistan did not care where the match was played, but broadcast alone does not fund a board.

The board reported losses on hosted series repeatedly through the decade. The precise figures varied and were disputed; the direction never did. Pakistan paid, year after year, for the privilege of playing at home somewhere else, while simultaneously losing the domestic economic activity that international cricket generates in a host city. Every hotel booking, every taxi fare, every stadium job in Lahore and Karachi went somewhere else instead. The structural pressures that put on the board's finances are part of the wider picture of cricket in Pakistan.

Coming home

The return was incremental and carefully sequenced.

Zimbabwe toured in May 2015 for limited-overs matches in Lahore, the first international cricket in the country since the attack. It was a modest fixture surrounded by extraordinary security, and the crowd's reaction to it was not modest at all.

The Pakistan Super League, which had itself been staged in the Emirates since its founding, brought its final to Lahore in 2017. A World XI played a three-match Twenty20 series in Lahore later that year. Sri Lanka returned for a Twenty20 international. West Indies played a short series in Karachi in 2018.

The decisive step came in December 2019, when Sri Lanka played the first Test matches in Pakistan since 2009, at Rawalpindi and Karachi. Bangladesh followed early in 2020. Test cricket had come home, and the Emirati chapter, which had already been winding down since the 2018 series, was effectively finished. Occasional fixtures continued to be staged at the Gulf grounds afterwards, but as a choice rather than a necessity.

What the decade left

For Pakistan, a generation of players with peculiar records, a board balance sheet that took years to repair, and a home crowd that had missed ten years of its own team.

For the host country, a decade of top-level international cricket that its own grounds staff, curators and officials worked through, described in more detail in the guide to the three stadiums. The expertise built during those years is a large part of why the grounds could later absorb an entire relocated IPL season and a Twenty20 World Cup at short notice, and it underpins the professional structure described in the guide to the Emirates Cricket Board.

For the sport, a demonstration that a Test nation can be kept functioning without a functioning home, which is a grim thing to have proved and a useful one. Whether it was ever a good arrangement is not really the question. It was the only arrangement, and it held for ten years.

Career records for the cricketers of that decade are in the player index, and the rest of the region's cricket sits on the hub.

Sources and method

This account is based on published Test and one-day international scorecards and series records, ICC ranking tables, contemporaneous reporting of the March 2009 attack and its consequences, Pakistan Cricket Board statements on hosting arrangements and the resumption of home cricket, and match reporting from the series described. Financial effects are described qualitatively because published figures were partial and contested. No current squads, contracts, officials or commercial arrangements are described.