LAWRENCE BOOTH’s colourful dispatch from England historic tour of Pakistan

Multan might be the hub of South Punjab, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, but it’s still getting used to hosting international matches again.

The three ODIs he hosted against the West Indies in June were the first played here for 14 years. England, meanwhile, are about to embark on the first Test of the venue since November 2006. Even by the recent, sedate standards of the Pakistani cricket circuit, it feels like the road less travelled.

To be part of the police escort from our city center hotel to the Multan Cricket Stadium (40 minutes on a good day) is to get a taste of novelty. Passers-by peer through our car windows, before turning around with mild disappointment when they realize we’re not Jimmy Anderson or Ben Stokes.

The streets are littered with dust, which mixes with morning mist and smog to create a haze that never fully dissipates. Not a place for asthma sufferers.

However, there is more to Multan than the usual tropes imagined by Westerners. It is one of the oldest cities in Asia, said to have been continuously inhabited for 3,000 years, and is known as the “City of Saints” due to its Sufi shrines.

The pity is that journalists cannot leave the hotel without a full-scale security operation involving dozens of armed police, sirens blaring as the convoy weaves its way through traffic or comes to a complete stop. Tourism will have to wait for another time.

The England players have grown accustomed to this kind of existence since arriving in Pakistan, after being confined to their luxurious Islamabad hotel, unlike the reporters, who towards the end of the first Test managed a visit to the Alta British Commission in the Pakistani capital. (Rawalpindi is Islamabad’s next door neighbor.)

Christian Turner, the British High Commissioner who will leave his job in January to take up a high-level diplomatic post in London, had promised us a briefing.

In the end, we were simply ushered, beer and wine in hand, to the bar area, where we did the diplomatic thing: socialized, ate, drank, watched World Cup soccer, played pool.

If you really need a drink, and you don’t have a High Commission invite, your best bet in Islamabad was to order the local Murree beer (malt, not bad at all) from room service. In Multan there is no choice, which is good for the liver and perhaps even better for the soul.

Above all, the reception here in Pakistan has been like no other. Deprived after a decade in which the team’s home away from home became the United Arab Emirates, the people here couldn’t be happier to welcome visitors.

An evening at La Montana restaurant, in the foothills of the Himalayas, with a spectacular view of Islamabad at night, will live long in the memory.

During the eight and a half hour road trip from Islamabad to Multan on Tuesday, through the greenhouses of Sargodha and the rice paddies of Hafizabad, there was nothing but friendly curiosity from the locals we met at our various stops. It was an experience.

There are still stories that are not particularly happy, such as the attack on the Pakistani embassy in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, by Islamic State gunmen shortly after Britain arrived in Islamabad.

This morning, it emerged that rival gangs in Multan had shot at each other near the team hotel, although officials insisted this would not affect the test.

However, it has been mostly a great good news story, and the crowd in Rawalpindi was especially encouraging. In a part of the world where white-ball cricket is in danger of swamping everything else, thousands turned up every day for the test and were more generous in their applause for England than other countries might have been.

On the one hand, they saw Pakistan lose. On the other hand, they conceded 1,768 runs, a record for a five-day Test, and seven centuries, including one for their hero Babar Azam.

One would have to be one-eyed not to have enjoyed the conclusion of the game, and Pakistani spectators are not. Passionate, to be sure, but not so partisan that they can’t know one of Test cricket’s greatest victories when they see it.

And the Multan smog? Mike Atherton, the former England captain who is here for both Sky Sports and The Times, thinks the game could have started half an hour late this morning.

If that persists throughout the game, we can lose the equivalent of a session and a quarter, more if the game ends prematurely as well.

Previous England captains may have complained about the dangers of traveling in Asia, but Stokes is cut from a different cloth. For him and Brendon McCullum, there are hurdles to overcome, and he has already promised a more attacking approach than in Rawalpindi, where England scored 6.73 over, a Test record over two innings.

The only time Pakistani journalists suspected anything resembling a colonial thought process was when they learned that England had brought its own chef on tour. When half the dressing room collapsed before Rawalpindi, the story was too good to ignore: surely England had been poisoned by her own cook!

Danny Reuben, the ECB’s excellent media liaison manager, tried his best to convince them there was no link, but not everyone seemed sure.

That was a rare misstep on a tour characterized by mutual friendship, with the teams even sharing facilities during training. It helps, of course, that Stokes’ men are playing a style of cricket only a curmudgeon could object to.

And thank God, really. The Australians’ visit here in March produced a bombastic series, later interrupted by some slick reverse bowling from the tourists which led to talk of a ’15 Day Test’. When Stokes was asked that at The Oval in September, after England’s victory over South Africa, he seemed unimpressed.

In the late 1980s, after the tour in which Mike Gatting traded nasty things with referee Shakoor Rana in Faisalabad, English tourists were paid a ‘hardship bonus’ of £1,000 per man. If they get tough again in Multan, it may be the test cricket that is in their debt.