The first step on a long, difficult but welcome road back to cricket in Pakistan

No place like home for Pakistan

Last Sunday there were a dozen games of cricket going on in one place or another, domestic fixtures in towns and cities across Bangladesh, South Africa and Zimbabwe, a one-day international in North Sound, Antigua, another, between two women’s teams, in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, and the second Test between India and Australia in Bengaluru.

Then there was the final of the Pakistan Super League, between Quetta Gladiators and Peshawar Zalmi, another ring-a-ding franchise match in one of the world’s many Twenty20 leagues, a game which might have passed unremarked except that it was being held at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. Some matches are about more than who wins, who loses, and who scores how many. The location made the game between Quetta and Peshawar one of them.

The match was a bust. Quetta’s overseas players, Kevin Pietersen, Luke Wright, Tymal Mills, Nathan McCullum and Rilee Rossouw all decided they did not want to go. As Wright wrote, “I have a young family and for me a game of cricket is just not worth the risk.” More than 100 people have died in terror attacks in Pakistan in the past five weeks, 13 of them in an explosion outside the Punjab Assembly, 20 minutes’ drive from the Gaddafi Stadium. So Quetta had to fly in four new players, Morne van Wyk, Rayad Emrit, Sean Ervine and Anamul Haque, to fill in at the last minute.

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