England cricketers will tour lucrative India but.......

What if, instead of an Indian Premier League, there was an opulent Pakistan Twenty20 tournament which offered them a million dollars each for six weeks' cricket in Karachi, Multan, Lahore and Faisalabad? Well, I'd wager that their kit and a copy of Ray Mears' survival guide would be packed already.

Actually, you don't even need to create the circumstances to test the relativity of the their resolve. On Saturday, following recent explosions in Jaipur and Bangalore, there were 16 bomb blasts in Ahmedabad, the place where England play the first Test against India this December. Yet, with players not wanting to jeopardise potentially lucrative contracts in next year's Indian Premier League, the only concession likely to be pushed for is a change of venue.

Like insurance companies, cricket players seem to have a sliding scale when it comes to assessing risk. The more on offer, the more emboldened they become.

The trouble with having the Champions Trophy in Pakistan is that it is a deeply unloved tournament taking place in a country few England players have ever had the stomach for. Given the opportunity to give both the swerve, players are always going to take it.

I'm with them on the ICC Champions Trophy, which although well-intentioned when it began back in 1998, serves little purpose except to clog the itinerary with more 50-over cricket.

But I'm against them on Pakistan, which is one of the more beautiful and fascinating countries to tour, providing you can escape the featureless Punjab triangle between Multan, Faisalabad and Lahore.

And that is Pakistan's problem at present, with regard to Western teams and fans. The interesting bits, like Peshawar, the Swat Valley and the tribal areas around the Khyber Pass have become hotbeds of Islamic fundamentalism and are therefore out of bounds, while Karachi, a vast, simmering cauldron of a city, can flare up in a trice.

Another hurdle is the modern obsession over "duty of care", with players now more aware about what employers can and cannot make them do. In the past, ignorance on such matters was widespread.

For instance, only a few players in England's 1987 World Cup squad were aware that Peshawar, where we played Sri Lanka in the group stages, was a bolthole for Mujahideen fighting the Russians in Afghanistan, their "hostels" set up by none other than Osama bin Laden.

While there, a bomb went off in the main market, killing several people. It was blamed on the KGB trying to kill Mujahideen leaders and we were simply told to be careful and to not venture far from our hotel. Certainly none of us contemplated returning home, though when I ventured with Allan Lamb and our intrepid chief supporter, Sir Tim Rice, to see a contraband smuggler in the tribal areas, a lawless region west of Peshawar, the team manager did give us a ticking off.

Whether or not you are a likely target should have a bearing on perceived risk. Back in 1987 the England team had no enemies off the field. But with Britain and Australia still standing shoulder to shoulder with George Bush on the global war against terror (but which many Muslims read as a war on Islam), players, journalists, and travelling fans from those countries all present targets for the extreme elements currently operating within Pakistan.

It is not a new phenomenon. England's cricketers felt threatened on their tour of India in 1984/85, following the assassination of the country's president Indira Gandhi. When Britain's Deputy High Commissioner, Percy Norris, was also shot dead in the discord that followed, the team became understandably nervous about playing on. To get players to stay, team manager Tony Brown threw all their passports on a table and told those who wanted out to take theirs and p**s off. Nobody did and with captain David Gower steadying nerves, England went on to win the Test series 2-1.

All teams are given armed protection in India and Pakistan these days, but it can be relative. Graeme Fowler, who was on that 1984 tour, remembers travelling on the bus full of soldiers handed the duty of looking after England.

"I asked one of them to show me the bullets for his rifle and he pulled three out of his pocket," recalls Fowler. "He told me that if he used any of them he'd have to replace them from his own wages, so you could see why he hadn't loaded them."

For some teams the threat has proved all too real with New Zealand twice feeling the shockwaves, following car bombs outside their hotels in Karachi and Colombo. The ICC can move the Champions Trophy from Pakistan but the back-up venue is Sri Lanka, a place where Tamil Tigers routinely explode devices, including several on England's last tour there.

It is a tricky problem for cricket, which as Kevin Pietersen pointed out last Friday, is only a sport and therefore one he is not prepared to lose his life for. King Kev is right to have such a perspective, just as long as he remembers that hypocrisy is a word difficult to shake off, should the IPL come a knocking.

Something to think about!

The important word on this comes form the official travel advisory for each Country. The travel advice to Pakistan, considering all the issues is that it is a dangerious place to visiit. This is the current standing situation in the US, UK and across EU. It is an independent assessment made by each country and is not influenced by player preferences. Player preferences is only relavant once the state advice is the affirmative.

Well said JC.

Will players like KP and Symo change their minds if the travel advisory tells them that its safe to play in Pakistan?

I personally don't mind an Asia-America cup with

PAK
IND
SL
WI
BAN

PAK should start planning for that and forget about the other teams.

PlanetPakistan wrote:I personally don't mind an Asia-America cup with

PAK
IND
SL
WI
BAN

PAK should start planning for that and forget about the other teams.

Then the winner clan play a real team like Eng/Aus/SA

Basil wrote:

PlanetPakistan wrote:I personally don't mind an Asia-America cup with

PAK
IND
SL
WI
BAN

PAK should start planning for that and forget about the other teams.

Then the winner clan play a real team like Eng/Aus/SA

where? fiji?