Displaced in Dubai

Life is simply better when England are playing a Test match. You can follow it throughout the day, pulling yourself away from a tedious lecture or turning round a boring lunch with the the simple question, “What’s the score in the cricket?”

Test cricket is possibly the perfect sport. It is slow and rhythmic when you want it to be, before sparking into occasional flurries of tension. It is not a sheltered game played indoors, it is open to the air and all the variables that come with such a setting. And it goes on for five days!

Yet to watch Test cricket in Dubai feels wrong. Not that one can tell the location of the Test match through the coverage. In fact, having said that, the identikit, empty, brand new, shiny stadium is typical Dubai. Test cricket is one of the sports that, as yet, has resisted the lure of the Middle East. Football is consumed by it, with Manchester City the UAE national side and with the FIFA World Cup having been bought by the Qataris.

Test cricket still seems pure, untouched, the rhythms of a Test match feel intact. The bastardisation of cricket has, thankfully, been collected and gathered up in the willing arms of Twenty20 cricket.

There are good reasons to hold this Test match in Dubai. The players are safer and the facilities are world-class   - world class because enough money has been thrown at them, which leaves them shiny but hollow and not the sort of place any sportsman deserving of the name wants to play.

But here we are, in the half-built neutral desert, playing a Test match that is used to the cauldrons of Lahore or Karachi. It's bizarre, displaced and lacks feeling, but that is Dubai. These days, if a sport finds itself in trouble, look to Dubai. Thank goodness for Dubai.