Andrew Miller's Pakistan tour diary: Languid Multan and its legendary son

Andrew Miller's Pakistan tour diary - November 7 to November 13

Languid Multan and its legendary son

Andrew Miller


Friday November 11



Actually I just got confirmation that it is a pic of all PP Mods, minus Merc off course for obvious reasons...he will off course need one pic by himself to fit his Lovely Personality in)

Click below to see it

http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/inl...225520.jpg?alt=

Picking the seam: Workers relax on a charpai, while testing the oranges for ripeness



Geoffrey Boycott once said of Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis that they could have bowled England out with an orange. It is just as well, for the egos of the batsmen concerned, that they never had the opportunity to take on the two Ws in Multan. For the Multan Cricket Association Stadium, the city's most state-of-the-art construction since the mighty Qasim Bagh fort, is situated right next to a sprawling orange grove, where contented workers test their produce for ripeness while idling on a string-crossed bed frame.


Multan's origins are so hazy that it is hard to pinpoint when exactly it was founded. Its glory days came under the Mughals in the 16th to 18th Centuries, although some believe it to be the oldest city in the subcontinent, dating back to 2000BC. The stadium itself, however, is a feast of modernity in an arid rural outcrop of the town. A faultlessly modern structure with roofs above even the cheapest of seats in the bleachers, it lies at the end of a wide sweeping presidential driveway, which can only have been designed with the arrival of an international cricket team in mind.

As with all the best motorcades, you heard the arrival before you saw it. The policemen attending to the traffic at the stadium junction became that little bit more urgent with their lathis, whipping impudent bicyclists into the verges to make way for the cortege, while sharp-shooters braced themselves on the broken farm walls that lined the route.

And then came the whoop of sirens and the screech of tyres, as a Wacky Races convoy came hurtling round the bend and down the final straight. Two outriders on motorcycles setting the pace, and a flashy police range-rover providing the red and blue effects lighting.


Next a more conventional blue plod-mobile, ahead of the team bus itself, with Jimmy Anderson peeping through the curtains wondering what all the fuss was about. The journalists' mini-bus came next, followed by another police van, and to top the whole procession off, a bright red and magnificently ancient fire engine, dredged from the depths of the Multan Municipal Corporation.

England's practice passes in a blur of uneventfulness, for the only contest on preview day is the fight to obtain the best seats in the press box. But the rickshaw journey home is a splendid buzz through the backstreets of Multan, now softly lit by a fading sun. Donkeys, donkeys everywhere, telegraphing their desperate world-weary gloom through the medium of ear semaphore. Some hung so low around their cheekbones that one half expected to look to the rooftops and find their tails being used as a door-knocker. Another, meanwhile, was such a picture of modesty that I swear I saw it wearing a veil.


HaHaHa


The buzz and bustle of Multan is of a more gentle, provincial, variety to the glam and glitz telegraphed by the streets of Lahore, or the thrusting urgency of Rawalpindi. It is not hard to work out where Inzamam-ul-Haq, the most famous Multani in existence, cultivated his gloriously dozy persona. But if rivers run deep with Inzy, then so it is with his hometown, and shortly before sunset, a snapshot of what lies beneath is revealed in a shortcut, as we weave through the narrow clay-lined curves of the old city, watching uninvestigated alleys whizz by at every stroke.

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Another, meanwhile, was such a picture of modesty that I swear I saw it wearing a veil.


HaHaHa

Click on the surprize in line 7 and see some familiar people (Their Identities revealed in line 5)