Why stadiums need a sense of place

There are many bad things about the new football stadium in Sao Paulo where the opening game of the World Cup was staged on Thursday (starting with its existence, given it was created for political reasons, when there were at least two existing stadiums in the city that with a lick of paint and minimal upgrading could have done the job perfectly well), but there is one thing that it gets emphatically right, and that is the fact that there are gaps in the corners.

There is a one-tier bowl, plus permanent second tiers down the long sides of the ground, with temporary stands at the two ends. In the corners are the big screens and television boxes, but they are low, so you can see through, and what that means is that you get a sense of where you are. After hours cooped up in the air-conditioned tent of the media, there's something refreshing about being able to see downtown Sao Paulo, shady hills in the background, a reminder that there is a world beyond the World Cup. When Brazil scored, you could see fireworks bursting in the evening sky.

This, of course, is an area in which cricket has a huge advantage over football. Because the stands tend to be lower, there is a constant sense of life going on outside, from Lumley Castle at Chester-le-Street to Table Mountain at Newlands, to Henry Blofeld's beloved buses passing Archbishop Tennyson's School outside The Oval.

That gives cricket stadiums an identity, a sense of place, that is vital but is all too often missing from football, with its identikit modern bowls that reach to the skies. And that's just thinking of the aesthetic, without considering what impact buildings or trees may have on atmospheric conditions: variety is good.

Old football grounds still occasionally have that sense of place. At Ninian Park, until two years ago the home of Cardiff City, for instance, you used to be able to see trains passing one corner of the ground. Roker Park, once the home of Sunderland, was one of many grounds that gave a glimpse of the terraced housing that surrounded them. At Tannadice, home of Dundee United, and Upton Park, home of West Ham United, there are flats that have a view into the stadium. They were or are grounds rooted in their communities. At the Estadio da Luz in Lisbon, home of this year's Champions League final, the castle is visible in the distance.

One of my favourite experiences in football was covering an Asian Cup game between Japan and Saudi Arabia in Saida, Lebanon, in 2000, at a time when it seemed the balance of power in Asian football was shifting from west (represented by the Saudis, winners of three of the previous four tournaments) to east (represented by Japan, who had won on home soil in 1992). To the right of the high main stand, the Mediterranean crashed against the rocks and a Crusader fort. Straight ahead, between the mountains that formed the western edge of the Bekaa Valley, a fairground was silhouetted against a purple sky in which lightning flickered. The scene was set for something dramatic, and what followed was the Gotterdammerung of Saudi football as they lost 4-1.

The backdrop added to the occasion. Too often, though, modern football stadiums reach up to the sky. In the homogenised world of the World Cup, it can be impossible to know where you are. I remember in 2006, in Germany, the sense of panic as I tried to add my byline and couldn't recall if I was in Cologne or Frankfurt. Thankfully FIFA, as though recognising the potential problems, add the names of the host cities on a hoarding by the halfway line.

But most of the time one football stadium is very much like another, particularly during major tournaments. The modern football ground is two or three tiers of plastic seats, with very little to distinguish them in terms of the angle of the seats or the distribution of the stands. They are comfortable and have good sight lines, but they are often generic, interchangeable.

Cricket grounds still have their idiosyncrasies, even if modern redevelopment - Adelaide perhaps most obviously - risks removing them. Of course it's understandable that executives want to pack in as many people as possible and maximise the returns on corporate hospitality, but at the same time cricket cannot lose what make its grounds unique - from the mountains of Dharamsala to the volcano at Pukekura to the trees at Kandy to the beach at St Vincent to the cathedral at Worcester. After all, without its quirks, cricket is nothing.

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Teams cannot risk tours to Pakistan

An armoured vehicle is patrolling a favela in Rio de Janeiro. Armed police guide national teams through streets that are cordoned off in this enthralling city. Poverty and wealth are uneasy neighbours, the fuse of a powder keg ready to explode. Months of demonstrations, of civil unrest, of violence and protests, have been an unexpected build-up. Nonetheless a government struggling for control is welcoming the world and promising a safe passage for the planet's richest sportsmen and their wide-eyed supporters. This is perhaps how sport should be, crashing directly into the rocks of social division. Brazil, in football, is the prime example of sport as national expression, a representation of the ambitions of Brazilian people within a complex sociopolitical environment.

The World Cup, this glorious showcase for the beautiful game, was never in doubt. No security issue is considered too hazardous, no stadium is declared too unready. High-profile international sport in a volatile country is possible. We all know that it is. A successful tournament may even heal some of the social wounds and conflict that now threaten Brazil's favourite sport.

A similar argument once seemed reasonable when discussing international cricket teams touring Pakistan. The security threats were containable. The benefits to Pakistan cricket and society in general far outstripped the remote, almost non-existent, risk of harm.

Three incidents destroyed any such logic. In 2002, a bomb exploded outside the Pearl Continental Hotel* in Karachi. Bombs are no longer unusual in Karachi, but this bomb detonated when the New Zealand cricket team was staying at the hotel. The Kiwis immediately returned home. Six years later and several hundred miles to the south east, a group of young men of Pakistani origin terrorised Mumbai. Cricket was an irrelevance, but cricketing relations between India and Pakistan became collateral damage.

Pakistan cricket, threatened with isolation in 2009, welcomed friends from Sri Lanka to demonstrate the safety of Pakistan as an international venue. Presidential-level security was offered, although this was moot, given the safety of Benazir Bhutto had been impossible to guarantee two years earlier. In the middle of the second Test in Lahore, near the Gaddafi Stadium, the home of Pakistan cricket, Sri Lanka's team bus was attacked, security men and bystanders were killed, and five players were injured. Sri Lanka went home and took international cricket with them.

Rather than sadness, it has become a blessed relief that international teams no longer risk tours to Pakistan. The risk of harm to players has far outstripped any possible benefits. No sport, no public morale boost, no symbolic hand of friendship deserves such folly. Ireland's pursuit of Test status and international acceptance does not require a suicide mission to Pakistan, where an alarming level of violence and terrorism is now the norm.

Other countries are also unsettled. Take Brazil, for example. But any promises of security from the Pakistan Cricket Board or the government are worthless. We saw it with Sri Lanka's cricketers and their presidential-level security. We saw it again at Karachi's airport. High-profile international sport is now impossible in Pakistan. It was once hard to imagine that cricketers could be terrorist targets but they seem obvious ones now. This is the moment, the tipping point, the point of no return.

A recently published report on urbanisation in Pakistan suggests that a third of Karachi is controlled by the Taliban. Rapid urbanisation of Karachi, other cities, and even some rural areas in Pakistan will create a fertile environment for more extremism unless measures are adopted now, says the report by the Wilson Center. Some of these measures are immediate but others are deep-rooted and long-term. Nothing will change in Pakistan fast, and by 2050 the Pakistani population will have reached 380 million. How is it possible for security to return quickly to Pakistan under these circumstances? Even if the correct strategies are adopted now, the benefits may not be realised for another two or three generations. Pakistan's security crisis has sunk so low, its sociopolitical circumstances are now so out of control, that there is no quick fix, no guarantee of safety.

Cricket may be doomed in the short- and even medium term, but Pakistanis are a resilient people, as their current cricketing exile has proved. Any prescription for recovery is a painful one but must centre on developing Pakistan's international base in the UAE to keep the national team competitive. Pakistan should also look again at England as an alternative home venue where support is strong.

Reinvigorating domestic cricket is a second strategic strand, so that it develops players, attracts sponsors and helps sustain the cricket board. Players who have scored centuries in Pakistan's domestic cricket go to play club cricket in England and struggle.

Finally, players must seize opportunities for development in other cricket nations, and the PCB must not be an obstacle here. If other national boards are genuinely willing to help Pakistan, why don't they allow a Pakistan A team to enter their domestic first-class competitions, for example? Clearly the long-term solutions are sociopolitical ones but the PCB needs to take a pragmatic view and accept the grim reality of Pakistan's ongoing security crisis.

Urging international teams to tour Pakistan is a futile exercise, a public-relations stunt, a show of misplaced bravado. The salvation of Pakistan cricket relies on other, more urgent and painstaking survival strategies.

Credits : Kamran Abbas 

How cricket can remain relevant during the football World Cup!!

Keep your chin up, cricket. Just because it's World Cup football season, there's no reason for you to be down in the mouth. While it may seem at times that all the attention is being lavished elsewhere over the coming days, you will always remain, like a less obviously successful sibling, special in the eyes of those who claim to love you. Here are a few things to remember that should help boost any flagging self-esteem and help you remain relevant over the course of the next month or so.

They needed a cricketer to kick off their World Cup

Did you catch the opening ceremony few days ago? You will have felt no small measure of pride, then, when that hideous TV "ball" peeled back to reveal, in varying states of undress and ready to perform the World Cup song, Jennifer Lopez, Claudia Leitte, and Herschelle Gibbs. While it's safe to say that Gibbs was better as a batsman than in his new incarnation as a singer (indeed, the moniker "Pitbull" would have been more apt while he was bludgeoning attacks in his prime), and let's not even talk about those trousers he was wearing (goddamn, son), the fact that he had such a central role to help kick off such a major event should nevertheless make you feel good about yourself, cricket.

India v England
With due respect to the football World Cup, and to a lesser extent Sri Lanka, the biggest draw of the summer is obviously England v India. English football may as well come to terms with the harsh truth: this tour still represents England's best bet at winning some silverware this summer in any sport. So don't miss the ceremonial Losing of the First Test by the tourists, and watch, riveted, as they play their traditional game of catch-up for the remainder of the series. If all this isn't enough to excite you, then I have just two words for you that should get you sufficiently pumped: Stuart Binny.

We have Test cricket and they don't
To borrow a phrase from Braveheart: they may take all the TV ratings over the summer, but they can never take away the sanctity of Test cricket. Granted, Spain v Netherlands tomorrow does have a certain appeal to it, but hey, it just so happens that we have West Indies playing New Zealand not all that much farther away. Spoilt for choice is what cricket fans are when it comes to their viewing pleasure. Truly, there really is nothing quite like the sight of "real" cricketers resplendent in their traditional whites, the atmosphere punctuated lazily by that one-of-a-kind sound of bat meeting willow, amplified as it resounds off the cavernous, traditionally half-empty stadium. Ah, Test cricket these days. You just have to breathe it in.

By asking what all the fuss is about
Oh, football, it's cute that you're excited about your World Cup. I remember a time when cricket used to have a World Cup once every four years as well. Now, due to the fact that we have more formats in the game than we do months in the year, it would seem that we have one every few days or so. How lucky are we, right? Right. World Cups are so passe. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, football. Except, I bet you don't even smoke a pipe. You don't even wear a tweed cap, do you? God, I feel sorry for you.

It's not like it's the IPL 
Cricket, you'll be the first to admit that the sound of a football World Cup in Brazil does carry a certain golden aura about it. But you will also be the first to just as quickly admit that it doesn't matter, because it's not like it's the IPL. They don't even have cheerleaders at their games. And what kind of crowning event of a sport doesn't have an announcer on hand screaming into the crowds the names of the two teams playing every ten seconds or so? How is one to know who is playing who? No wonder football games are so noisy: uninstructed, the rudderless fans simply don't know when to express their appreciation, and so resort to simply making noise all the time. Oh, and not one cutaway from live action to a celebrity in the crowd struggling to express themselves through the plastic cast of their faces? Yeah, file this one under not impressed.

No controversies about where to play
We don't have any controversies of the type FIFA is struggling with at the moment with regards to whether or not to hold the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, or with the protests against holding the current World Cup in Brazil itself. We just hold our World Cups in India whenever the BCCI demands it and everyone is just fine with that arrangement, or else. In fact, we do many things whenever the BCCI demands it. It's a simple, one-stop solution to a great many of life's problems. You should try it sometime, football.

Credit : R Rajkumar