A bit like playing cricket on the moon

It's a blustery day in Sharjah on Sunday. The wind is sniping across the lagoon outside and a milky band of haze hangs between the sky from the sea. The ambiguous weather serves to accentuate the strangeness of this place, a scandalous combination of money and emptiness that came about firstly because oil was discovered here, and secondly because the locals discovered a means of desalinating the sea water - hence providing salt-free water for drinking, industry and the watering of palm trees.

Cricket in Sharjah started in 1981 when two benefit teams (one captained by Javed Miandad, the other by Sunil Gavaskar) played a match on a concrete pitch surrounded by hastily erected scaffolding for the fans. The venue has since become a premier offshore site for India and Pakistan, hosting two tournaments a year normally featuring the sub-continental powers and usually throwing in a team or two from elsewhere for variety.

"When I packed up Test and county cricket I got an opportunity to start what I call this offshore cricketing centre," said Asif Iqbal, the former Pakistani and Kent batsman and tournament co-ordinator earlier this week.

"The neutrality of this venue has been important in its success and in our ability to bring both Pakistan and India here regularly."

Prior to India's two Tests at home to Pakistan in 1999, when they lost in Chennai but squared the series in New Delhi, the last Test series the two countries played against each other was ten yeas ago - a 1-1 draw in Pakistan.

Relations between the two countries, particularly over the disputed region of Kashmir, have never been cordial but Sharjah has historically provided them with a means of playing regular one-day cricket against one another (they have played each other 23 times since the inception of cricket here in the mid-eighties, Pakistan winning 17 times and India six) at a place which is neither a home nor an away game for either side.

There are expatriate Indian and Pakistani communities in the gulf so both teams have local support, unlike the South Africans, who are in the peculiar position of playing at a venue in which they aren't playing against local opposition.

A team from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), of which Sharjah and Dubai are part, qualified for the 1996 World Cup in India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan.

Unfortunately for cricket in the area, the International Cricket Council's (ICC) qualification rule was amended for the 1999 World Cup, which meant that short-term residents of a particular associate member country could not represent that country on the cricket field.

As a result, the expatriate Indian and Pakistanis who played for the UAE in the 1996 World Cup weren't on hand to help them to get to England last year, although Iqbal is hopeful that with an expanded format for the 2003 World Cup in South Africa, the UAE will be able to qualify with indigenous players.

The strange thing here is that the UAE are seldom, if ever, featured in the tournaments here, surely something which isn't of much benefit to the local cricket. This leads me to surmise that cricket in Sharjah, for all the trumpeting about neutral offshore venues and the like, is all about providing a subcontinental cricket spectacle for television which, according to my information, has covered tournaments almost since the start.

World-Tel, with Henry Blofeld as their main commentator, were first to swoop on the spectacle in the middle-eighties; at present it is Australia's Channel 9. It is the presence of television - beamed into millions of homes in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh - that gives real purpose to the competition here, a competition that has had various sponsors (Rothmans were one, Pepsi another) and various names, such as the Australasia Cup, but no essence, no real meaning, tradition or history.

This is less noticeable in the case of India and Pakistan, perhaps, than it is in the case of South Africa, who, in a way, are playing cricket here in a vacuum detached from purpose.

Place this spectacle in a desert environment big on money but short on history; a natural environment that can lead to ennui and alienation quite easily and you have cricket in Sharjah. It's all extremely pleasant but you might as well be playing cricket on the moon.