Aminul Islam coached the China Under-19 boys and will now work with the girls © AFP

As one national team prepares to take its leave of Bangladesh, another has flown in to take its place. But the 40-member squad that arrived in Dhaka on Tuesday evening was of a distinctly different profile to that of England’s cricketers. The Chinese women’s squad and their Under-19 counterparts are at the start of a month-long training tour, as they prepare to make their bow at the Asian Games in November.

The visit is part of an Asian Cricket Council initiative to spread the game into new territories in the region, and the Chinese men’s squad is already back home after their own visit earlier in the year. It is a reminder that Bangladesh, while still finding their feet at the very highest level of the game, are already a cut above the competition when you travel east of India.

There is a familiar figure at the forefront of the project to promote cricket in the region, a man who Bangladesh might one day do well to reclaim as their own. Aminul Islam achieved instant fame in November 2000 when he scored a century in his country’s inaugural Test, but for the past two-and-a-half years he has been working as one of three development officers at the ACC, with a brief to oversee six of the 18 countries in the region - Singapore, Brunei, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand ... and the big one.

“We are putting extra effort into China, because without China, cricket is not a global sport,” Aminul told Cricinfo. “It is a very special project. When I started out, they didn’t have any facilities or experience, because cricket is very much an English game with complicated rules and customs, but since I’ve been involved we have introduced the sport to 101 schools, and with help from the ACC and Cricket Australia, we have trained more than 100 Level One coaches.”

Aminul is almost certainly the only Test cricketer to speak fluent Chinese, but he sincerely hopes he won’t be the last. With a population of over 1.3 billion, the possibilities are endless if China chooses to latch onto a sport that appeals to strategic thinkers as well as pure athletes. “If China walks at the pace of other countries, the gap will always remain the same,” said Aminul. “But if they choose to run, within five or seven years’ time, they will be an exciting team.

“They may not know about cricket, but they are skilled in other areas,” he added. “For example, the country has 20 biomechanical laboratories, and they recently took the data from a series of tests on Australia’s elite players, and compared them to their local players.” The man behind that project was a certain Professor Liu, a Level Two coach and umpire, and the author of one of China’s first cricket books.

There is a certain irony about Aminul’s role – he is an experienced Bangladeshi cricketer exporting his knowledge to a less-well-versed nation, while his own country imports foreign coaches to take their own game to the next level. But in that regard, Aminul has taken on board the philosophy of his former coach, Bangladesh’s original director of development, Eddie Barlow, who always saw himself as a caretaker boss until there was sufficient homegrown expertise to take over.

“Imported coaches are important,” said Aminul. “They know the game better, and they have more technical skills. But cricket is a high-speed ball-game and also a mental game, so it is impossible to try to explain it fully in the wrong language. In Bangladesh, I believe that the time has come, after 11 years, for us to find a local leader, a local soldier, to take the team to the next level.”

The contrasts between Bangladesh and China are vast, but where cricket is concerned there could be scope for a mutually beneficial arrangement. On the one hand, Bangladesh is a poor country brimful of enthusiasm, on the other, China is limitlessly rich, but as yet unaware of the sport’s possibilities.

Right now, the Chinese training camp is taking place at the Spartan environs of Bangladesh’s national academy, the BKSP in Savar, but who knows, in a few years’ time, maybe such events will take place at state-of-the-art facilities at China’s headquarters in Shenyang, or maybe even Dhaka or Chittagong. After all, it was Chinese money that funded most of the redevelopment ahead of the 2007 World Cup.

Although he remains committed to his ACC role at least until the end of the Asian Games, Aminul is open to the possibility of a return to his home country, where his experience in development would doubtless prove invaluable as Bangladesh seeks to solidify the structures that have been developing, all too slowly in some cases, since they rose to Test status a decade ago.

“The No. 1 thing that Bangladesh cricket needs is a solid plan to use the 150 million people who remain unexplored,” he said. “We need a concrete plan, to increase the limited control that we currently have, and we need to create a strong pipeline, to improve our insubstantial foundations. I am a son of Bangladesh, so if I received a good and responsible call, I would think about coming back. My country has given me so much.”

	Jim Harris looks on as his son Ryan runs through New Zealand on Test debut © Cricinfo Ltd

When Ryan Harris ran through the New Zealand lower order on Tuesday morning and helped Australia to victory, there was only one man at the Basin Reserve prouder of his efforts than the bowler himself. Sitting high up in the RA Vance stand, Jim Harris was a satisfied man, quietly watching his son getting rewarded for all his hard work.

It was an emotional time for the Harris family. Ryan said last week that when he received his baggy green he would be thinking of his mother Gai, who died from lung cancer in 2006. His father and brother Gavin were on hand to witness his Test debut, having flown out from Australia with only the hope that he would get the nod to play.

As it turned out, Jim nearly missed his son’s cap presentation as the public gates at the Basin Reserve were still closed when the Australians circled around their newest Test player on the ground on Friday morning. A quick appeal to the security staff and he was ushered around to another entrance, hustled in to the venue and was just in time to see the memorable moment.

Jim rode the highs and lows of the match with Ryan, from his first wicket when Michael Hussey held on to a catch at gully, to a worrying crash in the field with Mitchell Johnson that left them both a bit sore, to the three wickets he collected on the final morning to set up Australia’s win. That Harris finished the game with six wickets pleased his father – Jim had bet a mate that his son would take 12 for the series because “if he gets three in every innings he’s done his job”.

Ryan has a tattoo of his mother’s star sign on his chest and said during last week that “she’s always with me”. This week Dad was there, too, and boy was he proud.

	Prolific spectator: Luke Gillian © Cricinfo Ltd

While Michael Clarke was on the way to his highest Test score, another milestone was being celebrated on the grassy hill at the Basin Reserve. Australia’s most dedicated fan was watching his 150th Test match. Not a bad effort for a man who hasn’t even hit his 40th birthday.

In his colourful shirts, replica baggy green and with his Australian flag in hand, Luke Gillian has become a fixture of Australian tours all over the world. So much so that when he celebrated his 100th Test, in Auckland five years ago, he became the first non-team member to sing "Under the Southern Cross" with the players in the rooms after a win, when Justin Langer invited him to join them.

“My first time in the dressing room was in Karachi ’98,” Gillian told Cricinfo at the Basin Reserve. “I was there when the boys were lining up to sing the team song and I thought ‘You beauty, fantastic.’ But then Ian Healy came around and said ‘Out! Team only!’ So I listened to the team song through the window and 69 Test matches later I was in there.”

The first Test he ever attended was the Centenary Test, when he was six years old, and his first overseas Test was in Barbados in 1995. Although he admits that following the team all over the world is getting “a bit weary”, he rests up between tours by working as a chef in London.

Gillian is a staunch Australian fan and loves to be on hand to support his boys, but what he’s most interested in is seeing terrific Test cricket. To that end, his favourite series was one that Australia didn’t even win: the 2-1 loss in India in 2000-01.

“It was fantastic Test cricket from the shellacking that we handed out to India in three days in Mumbai to that classic match in Kolkata that pretty much goes down in cricket folklore,” he said. “Fifty years from now, people will still be going ‘Did that really happen? Did they follow on and score 657 and then roll us out?’ And then to go on to Chennai, which was my 50th Test, and to have it go down to day five and that last session.”

The numbers roll off his tongue with certainty, perhaps because he carries with him a diary in which he records scores and statistics from all the games he has attended. His current book dates back to the home series against Sri Lanka in 2007-08 and he has at least 10 diaries at home, although he was devastated to lose the book that had his scores from the 2003 World Cup. There are sure to be plenty more to come.

It was a clash of two major teams, but with the match on TV the crowd was small at the Bangabandhu © Getty Images

On Sunday, Manchester United take on Liverpool in one of the Premier League highlights of the season, but for Bangladesh football fans (of whom there are several million), their very own Clash of the Titans took place on Friday evening. When Abahani, the league leaders, took on Mohammadan Sporting Club, in third place, it was a contest that could have decided the destiny of the 2009-10 title. And it was all played out at the country’s former home of cricket, the Bangabandhu Stadium in Dhaka.

Football in Bangladesh has a long and proud heritage, and for many years it was, by some distance, the most popular sport in the country. Whereas cricket was seen as an expensive and time-consuming pastime, and one that harked back to a bygone era, football was cheap, simple, and appealed to the masses, not least during the Independence struggle in 1971, when the national team, exiled to India, became one of the first bodies to popularise the country’s green-and-red flag.

Subsequently that passion was channelled into the Bangladesh League, and the rivalry between Mohammadan and Abahani, the two biggest clubs in Dhaka, became as intense as any local derby you’d care to mention. However, the atmosphere in Friday’s latest encounter lacked a certain sizzle. Where once a sell-out would have been guaranteed, now there were fewer than 6000 people turning out for a fixture that was being broadcast live on national TV. As one local journalist put it: “Cricket eats everything”.

All the same, it was an entertaining and high-octane encounter, as you’d expect from the only two teams still unbeaten in the league this year. Abahani, the defending champions, had won 11 out of 11 in 2009-10, but they were the happiest with a 0-0 draw, after surviving three clear-cut chances –all from the striker, Bokula Olalikan, who hit the crossbar in the fifth minute, had another shot cleared off the line in the final 20, and also skewed an ambitious scissor-kick past the post.

Abahani, for their part, missed a golden opportunity to snatch the spoils, and extend their lead over Mohammadan to 10 points, when Awudu Ibrahim’s through-ball was blasted high and wide by an off-balance Sheriff Deen Mohammad. It just so happened that many of the supporters on both sides were busy praying at that moment. The contents of those prayers would have made very interesting reading indeed.

The quality of the contest was comparable with the last football match I witnessed live, Leyton Orient v Carlisle back in 2008, which is to say it was feisty, committed, but lacking perhaps a touch of panache. But then again, given that (on a pro-rata scale) your average Premier League star might have featured for roughly ten seconds before his wage-bill became too much, the B-League wasn’t really designed with pampered primadonnas in mind.

But at least the stadium looked good for the TV cameras, because the shabby old ground that hosted England’s cricketers on their last visit in 2003 has undergone a serious facelift in recent years. For starters, it’s had several licks of paint, with bright yellow now the signature colour instead of dank grey, and where cricket was once the venue’s co-habitee, now athletics has made its indelible mark, with a state-of-the-art running track circling the perimeter, and a purpose-built press-box sitting parallel to the 100m straight.

Most of the renovations were made in time for the recent South Asian Games, the subcontinent’s equivalent of the Olympics, and the impact of hosting such a high-profile event has been felt all around the neighbourhood. A brand-new handball arena has been erected right next to the main gate, with an indoor complex for badminton and boxing a few hundred metres down the road. Even the old open-air swimming pool on the opposite flank has been given a bit of a touch-up, although its waters still look off-puttingly murky, except in the brightest of midday sunshine.

And yet, incredibly, there’s another phase of rebuilding lurking around the corner, because in just under a year’s time, the 2011 World Cup comes to town, and despite having been out of service as a cricket venue since 2005, the Bangabandhu has been chosen to host the opening ceremony. Ever a political punchbag, it has been decreed that the majority of the ground's existing stands will be torn down and started over, at a cost that soars into the millions in any currency.

But unlike the Trelawny Stadium in Jamaica, which has served no recognisable purpose since being built to provide what was arguably the high point of the 2007 World Cup, at least the Bangabandhu remains a focal point for Bangladesh sport. It’s just a pity that the crowds aren’t quite what they used to be.

	There would be a new twist to the rivalry between Richard Hadlee and the Chappell brothers © Getty Images

Flying from Melbourne to Wellington feels more like a domestic trip than an international voyage. Passports are not stamped, accents change only slightly and it’s a shorter flight than from Melbourne to Perth. Even when an Australian settles down in New Zealand, their TV screens show Aussie sights like Eddie McGuire asking million-dollar questions and Kevin Rudd answering queries of his own on parliament question time.

The two countries have their own distinct characteristics but share much more than not. The former New Zealand prime minister Mike Moore once said that Australians and New Zealanders had more in common than New Yorkers and Californians. Some of that goes back to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZACs) of World War I but even earlier, in the 1890s, New Zealand considered joining the soon-to-be Federation of Australia. Even Fiji was in the mix to become a state, while Western Australia was a somewhat reluctant participant.

Obviously New Zealand chose to go its own way and WA joined, although the state did hold a referendum in the 1930s over the possibility of seceding. And that brings me to my point. What if the Federation of Australia featured six states – Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand – while Western Australia remained independent? What would that mean for the sporting landscape?

There would be no Michael Hussey in the Australian cricket team, and in years gone by Dennis Lillee and Rod Marsh would have lined up against the baggy-green wearing Jeff Thomson, Greg Chappell and Doug Walters. The Australian side would have enjoyed the benefit of a certain Sir Richard Hadlee, while Daniel Vettori and Shane Warne could have bowled spin in tandem.

The underarm ball, which helped solidify the cricketing antagonism between the two countries, would never have happened. There would be no rivalry between the All Blacks and the Wallabies and the intertwined histories of the two nations’ netball sides would cease to exist. No, it’s better this way. Everyone needs a friendly rival, with whom competition is fierce and comradeship is even stronger. But domestic holidays in Fiji would have been nice.

	The floodlit pitch of the Baniatila Premier League © Andrew Miller

There’s a lot of time for looking out of the window while waiting for the lift at the Asian SR Hotel in Chittagong, but on Sunday night the standard view of random headlights, flickering tea-lights and silhouetted passers-by had been transformed beyond recognition. Across the road, in a field that had previously been occupied by a herd of non-descript sheep, was a sight that England’s Johnny Cash-obsessed cricketers might well have described as “a burning ring of fire”.

What it actually turned out to be was the opening round of the Baniatila Premier League, a brand-new floodlit tournament that was the very definition of grass-roots cricket, even down to the surface on which it was being played – a patch of arid, dusty soil in desperate need of watering to enable anything substantial to grow. And yet, the bare facts of the event were nonetheless astonishing – not least the size of the crowd, which had to number at least 200 people, set three bodies deep all around the boundary’s edge.

That boundary itself was marked out by a series of bamboo poles – each topped with a home-security-style floodlight and strung together with a single white flex of electrical cabling that was being fed from the mains of a nearby house – but the playing area it encircled was tiny. A regulation 22-yard strip had been rolled as flat and hard as possible along the middle, with proper stumps and bails at either end, but the distance to the boundary could not have been more than five metres in some places.

None of this impacted on the competitiveness of the cricket, the enthusiasm of the support, or indeed the administration of the event. On a whitewashed wall that backs onto the Chittagong-Dhaka railway line, a rudimentary scoreboard had been sketched out in black paint, and beneath it a rickety table had been pulled up for the statisticians – a whole army of them it seemed, to cope with the facts and figures of up to 22 different teams.

The matches themselves were eight-over-a-side contests, with one or two quirky features to adapt to the constricted circumstances of the venue. All of the bowlers on display were unrepentant chuckers, imparting massive spin and brisk velocity on the tape-balls used for each game, but the batsmen responded with elegant and inventive strokes, their footwork light and adaptable on the less-than-even surface.

Perhaps most significantly of all, the tournament had a six-is-out rule, which meant that the players had to learn to keep the ball down at all times. So much for the IPL taking the art out of batsmanship. With the busy Station Road at one end of the ground and the railway tracks at the other, not to mention a deep and niffy buffalo wallow at midwicket, all it takes is the introduction of a few natural hazards, and the game’s traditional skills will be passed on from generation to generation.

As it turned out, that very rule played a huge part in the most thrilling match of the evening, the final game between the Blues and the Whites. The Blues were up against it, needing 39 off the last two overs, but six consecutive fours brought the requirement down to 15 from six. The Blues captain then holed out to extra cover (15 off five) before three more fours took the game down to the last ball. But then, pumped with adrenalin and emboldened by the crowd, the Blues matchwinner-in-waiting launched a massive six clean over long-off, leaving his opponents victorious by two.

Aside from the clear interest that the tournament was generating down on Station Road, however, it was hard to tell quite how relevant this sort of event was in terms of the wider growth and development of Bangladesh cricket. All over the country, there is more and more evidence of the sport taking hold at grass-roots level – and this year, I was told, was the first time an event such as the BPL had taken place in Chittagong – but it’s debatable quite how much penetration, if any, there is to higher levels of the game.

One of the players I met at the event was named Pavel, a young allrounder who claimed to be on the books of Chittagong Division – and seeing as his name was one of two (along with “Sohel”) to be etched on the honours-board section of the wall, it was clear that he really was a player of some promise. But he told me his dream of playing cricket for a living was already withering away. With a father in retirement and a family to support, his main priority was to keep studying while moving up the ladder in his job at the bank, Citilink.

At Chittagong Stadium, the elite cricketers of Bangladesh made great strides in the first Test, and gave England a fright that few had imagined they could muster. But for all the enthusiasm for cricket in the country, the speed and the gradient of the descent to grass-roots is alarming. A means to harness the energy on the street, and send it catapulting to the uppermost tiers of the game, is essential if the sport is to embed itself in the society as securely as it ought.

	Cally Barlow looks on at the first Test © Mir Farid

Midway through the first day of the Chittagong Test, a commotion broke out in the press box as an elegant, well-dressed English lady breezed into the room and set about chatting to the local journalists, with a TV camera tracking her every move, and dictaphones at the ready to jot down her utterances. The lady in question was Cally Barlow, the widow of the late, great Eddie, and her return to Bangladesh was the hot news of the day.

Eddie Barlow’s brief spell as the coach of Bangladesh seems almost incidental in the grand scheme of his life story – a tale which included 30 Tests at the height of South Africa’s pre-isolation powers in the 1960s, and a significant role in the liberalising of the board thereafter. He came to Bangladesh in 1999 with a remit to guide them through the turbulent early years of their full Test status, but his tenure came to a sad end one year later, after he suffered the first of a series of strokes that would lead ultimately to his death in 2005, at the age of 65.

And yet, as Cally’s return to Bangladesh shows only too well, there was something about the Barlow era that made a lasting and devoted impression on the country. “He was more than a coach, he was a father to our team,” said Aminul Islam, Barlow’s first captain, and the man who, in November 2000, marked his country’s inaugural Test with a life-changing 145. “To lose him when we did was the biggest setback in the history of Bangladesh cricket.”

Without wishing to draw unwarranted parallels, Bangladesh has a tendency to revere its fallen leaders – men who promised much but were cut off in their prime. But in the case of Barlow, the affection is infectious. On the eve of the first Test, a party was held at the prestigious Chittagong Club, the tranquil retreat for the city’s movers and shakers, with its verandahs, bow-tied waiters, and air of colonial splendour. But Cally’s arrival was the defining moment of the evening, as the great and the good queued up to pay homage.

The class of 2000 were all out in force – Akram Khan, Habibul Bashar, and a certain former player whom she greeted, with mock admonishment, as “a very naughty boy”, before expressing incredulity that he’d actually settled down and married. For a variety of reasons, this was the very first time that Cally had been back in nearly ten years, although as her business card pointed out: “I speak to male and female groups and societies on Eddie Barlow, South Africa and Bangladesh”, to be gone and to be forgotten are two very different things.

“The Barlows treated the team like family,” explained one former journalist who remembered the warmth of the relationships in those early days, from shared meals (eaten with the hands, of course) at their training camps at Savar, to a good-humoured approach to such thorny issues as time-keeping. It was a bond which actually became closer after Eddie’s stroke in May 2000, a full six months before their inaugural Test against India at Dhaka, as Cally became a permanent fixture within the dressing-room, helping her husband with his mobility, as well as putting his plans and schemes for development down on paper.

Those plans, in fact, are Barlow’s greatest legacy, for his actual job description was that of director of development – a subtle distinction from the head coach roles of the BCB’s subsequent imports, Dav Whatmore and Jamie Siddons. His was a bottom-up appointment designed to kickstart the infrastructure of a country that, at the time it acquired Test status, had no first-class competition and just a single indoor nets facility. Barlow’s boundless enthusiasm (his defining characteristic throughout his playing career), allied to his previous experience of South African grassroots cricket, made him a natural at tackling such a daunting task.

“The first thing Eddie said to the board was, you don’t actually want me here, I’m just a caretaker,” Cally recalled. “His grand plan was to train up 500 Bangladeshi coaches, and eventually give them the means to look after the game themselves." That number has now reached 350, but not all of Barlow's schemes were as successful as the rest. An attempt to set up an umpiring seminar, with Steve Bucknor flown in as the principal speaker, fell flat on its face when it became apparent that not one of the 40 men present in the room could understand his soft Jamaican lilt.

And meanwhile, sitting in mothballs in some forgotten corner of the BCB’s boardroom, is a proposal to bring Bangladesh’s six-team Divisional first-class tournament under the auspices of the various international banks that operate in the country. Standard Chartered Dhaka Division, or HSBC Rajshahi Division, would have provided jobs and education for the players, opportunities after retirement, and an increased profile for the competition. But alas it was not to be.

Could Barlow really have made a difference, had fate not intervened so cruelly? Bangladesh’s myriad social and political problems would surely have beaten him in the end (and Cally’s return happens to coincide with the return to power of the government who hired her husband), but those who saw him in action have no doubt about what he contributed.

“He was a class apart,” said Aminul. “He understood our culture and never got frustrated, and he was so relaxed on the day of our first Test that we just went out and performed.” Bangladesh won the toss and batted first on that day in November 2000, and with Aminul leading the charge, they stunned the world by posting 400 at their first attempt.

“I do think he could have changed things,” Aminul added. “He started writing coaching books, and he was always coming up with theories, which he made sure were translated into Bangla. And though his job was to develop the next generation, he also believed in his senior players, and always said that any cricket team needed 55% experience.”

A lesson, perhaps, for the class of 2010, for Barlow's premature departure changed the priorities of the board. In his absence, Bangladesh’s homegrown coaches lacked the experience to cope, and following the debacle of the 2003 World Cup (when Canada’s victory provided the ultimate humiliation) Whatmore and then Siddons were set the task of concentrating on the elite, with intermittent success, but without ever setting out a clear plan for the millions who seek a chance.

“Our group has progressed, but I’m not sure about our infrastructure,” said Siddons, who has been in his job for almost a quarter of Bangladesh’s Test history. “There are only three or four bowling machines in the country for 150 million people, which means there’s privilege for about 120 cricketers and the rest have to fight their way through. The only way to get better is to stay in the group, travel the world, train in good conditions, and learn the hard way at international level. There’s no alternative.”

It’s little wonder that Bangladesh cricket laments the path from which it deviated, almost before it had started out its journey.

	The Railwayman’s Inn on Station Road © Andrew Miller

The Railwayman’s Inn on Station Road sounds like a thoroughly conventional boozer. The sort of place with a jukebox and soiled brown carpets, and a dozy clientele of commuters waiting for the 17.32 to Paddington. The Railwayman’s Inn on Station Road in Chittagong, on the other hand, is something else entirely.

Mind you, Station Road in Chittagong is a sufficiently different sort of place as it is. It’s a long wide boulevard of the distinctly functional variety, with cheap and cheerful hotels lined up along one side, and even cheaper, rather less cheerful stalls and boutiques on the other.

It’s grimy and noisy, and tailored towards a transient market, with the average trip across
the road bringing to mind that old-school computer game, Frogger. As you dither through the
traffic, a constant stream of buses, lorries, carts, rickshaws and auto-rickshaws bear down
on you at every speed imaginable, first from one direction, then from another, with only a
thin brick kerb in the middle providing any sanctuary.

If you time your run right, you can even tuck into a power-up on the other side, because for some reason there seems to be an intermittent but constant stream of banana-traders marching steadfastly up the hill with their loads strung out in two pans across their shoulders. Ten taka (10p) for a bunch of four, and that’s breakfast sorted for another day.

But back to the boozer, because frankly that’s the logical place to go back to after a hard day’s hacking in the Chittagong press box. It’s a five-minute wander from my digs at the Asian SR Hotel, through a fog of exhaust fumes from the endlessly revving engines of Chittagong’s Bus Depot (from which you will be whisked on a ten-hour, 20 taka trip back to Dhaka if you drop your guard for so much as a moment), and then round the corner by the partially collapsed building on the left of the road as you approach the roundabout.

If you blink, you miss the turn-off, because immediately you’re plunged into darkness for 20 metres, as you totter down a muddy back-alley towards a green staircase behind an iron
shutter, where a burly security guard is the only clue as to the riches that lie within. But a smart salute (and occasionally a palmful of baksheesh) earns you the right to ascend to the second floor, where a cavernous and unlit restaurant marks the gold at the end of the rainbow.

It's not a lot to look at, but then Bangladeshi bars don’t really go in for frills. Strictly speaking, alcohol is frowned upon in these parts, but frankly, given the run-ins the country has had with religion in the past, no-one actually gives two hoots any more. Certainly not the landlords, when they can rake in 140 Takas (£1.40) for a coke-sized can of “Hunters”, whose blue, red and gold emblem looks suspiciously similar to a certain well-known Aussie lager.

It may be a seedy setting, but it's a distinctly up-market clientele (and given that each beer costs more than the country's average daily income, that's not exactly surprising). A large fish tank behind the bar is the only designated source of light, although with satellite TV showing everything from Bollywood to the Premier League, the venue flickers with a cinema-like glow.

Except of course, when one of Chittagong's regular power-cuts kicks in. But as and when that
happens, the conversation carries on without so much as a beat being skipped. As if an
announcement had gone out that the 17.32 to Paddington has been delayed by approximately 40 minutes. And we apologise for the inconvenience it may cause.

Even when the cricket team loses, the festivities and celebrations do not stop in Bangladesh © Cricinfo Ltd.

No matter what criticism comes Bangladesh’s way after each new whitewashed series, it rarely takes long for the singing and dancing to resume. In the case of their 45-run defeat in Chittagong on Friday, their bouncebackability was so instantaneous, it was already underway before the presentation ceremony had concluded.

As the ever-enthusiastic crowds drained into the fields behind the stands, and the press corps trooped off to conduct the post-match briefing, the sounds of nascent revelry began to float out from the village that backs onto the ground. And as dusk kicked in, the atmosphere kicked off, with all manner of excitement wafting up from an otherwise sleepy community.

The village of Malpara lies a half-hour drive from the centre of town, across two railway lines and past a rickshaw graveyard, and near an expanse of scrap-metal merchants where the spoils of Chittagong’s famous ship-breaking yards are hammered back into shape. It was a quiet fishing settlement long before the Bangladesh Cricket Board parked the Chittagong Divisional Stadium on its doorstep, but happily for the villagers, the impact of the intrusion seems, for the most part, to have been beneficial.

During the ground’s construction back in 2003, many of the local women earned extra income by chiselling bricks while sat beneath flimsy umbrellas, and if that sounds like a hardship then it at least helped establish a firm link with the community. Besides, you’d be hard-pressed to find any children in the neighbourhood whose lives haven’t been enriched by the thrill of big-match cricket on their doorstep.

Just as was the case back then, the villagers’ cows still shelter beneath the stands at night, and occasionally find their way through an unlocked gate, while during the heat of the day, the scrubby grass is taken over by an expanse of drying nets, dotted with contemplative fishermen armed with threads and needles. The Bay of Bengal lies barely a kilometre to the west, where fragile sampans run daily jousts with the mighty freighters of Bangladesh’s busiest port.

But tonight Malpara had an atmosphere that was distinctly out of the ordinary. The flickering glow of bonfires was visible against the night sky, while a row of market stalls had been set up along the perimeter wall, selling trinkets and jewellry, popguns and dolls, and great piles of sticky teeth-extracting sweets and cakes.

It turned out that the villagers were preparing for the spring festival of Holi, the one which involves coloured powder being flung in all directions, and which basically amounts to a religiously sanctioned riot. Bangladeshi culture tends towards the secular, so this is a party for all creeds to enjoy. Aklas, the press box’s irrepressible tea-boy (whose eye for a thirsty hack is quite possibly without equal), sensed my interest in what was going on, and took it upon himself to organise an impromptu tour. The net result was predictably chaotic.

Off we wandered through the narrow and teeming streets, where my fascination and bewilderment was at the very least matched by that of the startled locals, who hadn't bargained for a gangling gora in their midst. Feeling much as I’d imagine Prince Charles to feel in such a situation, I found myself stopping at random stalls along the way, examining the wares on display (including three exceptionally tempting vats of curry), and gesturing “And what do you do?” style questions at their owners.

On a quieter evening, there might have been time to drink in the atmosphere, but tonight that wasn’t an option. Pandemonium greeted my every step, as I was swept through the streets on a tide of revellers, past doorways and alleyways and round and round the houses, before stopping finally at the focal point of the celebrations, the village temple, where a troupe of musicians were playing their drums and flutes and cymbals, with the womenfolk sat at the entrance in their finest saris, soaking up the scene.

A few more rapid introductions later, and off I floated in the other direction, with Aklas leading a merry march, and a train of children in our wake, bouncing off the stalls in over-excitement. And then, within a matter of seconds, I was back where I'd started. In the air-conditioned sanctuary of the press box, reunited with my laptop, and surrounded once again by furrow-browed hacks with their deadlines looming. Back in a world far removed from the one I'd just left behind.

	A quieter life: the train journey to Chittagong was a chance to escape the madness of Dhaka © Andrew Miller

England’s cricketers must have a carbon footprint the size of the Jolly Green Giant. When they aren’t playing, practising or resting in a hotel, they can invariably be tracked down to an airport of some description – either jetting off long-haul to some far-flung destination, or hopping domestically from one island, state or city to the next. But of all the internal routes that they’ve encountered, Dhaka to Chittagong must be one of their most ill-starred.

On the 2003 tour, that short but intense route claimed a notable casualty in Steve Harmison, whose high-kicking hostility had been too much for Bangladesh in the first Test at Dhaka, but whose back folded like a deckchair during the 50 minutes he spent squeezed into a seat that had been designed without six-foot-several Geordies in mind. (At least that was the official line – unofficially, the management had simply lost the will to deal with his homesickness, but that’s another story.)

Six years on, and the curse has struck again, and that’s before anyone dares ask for an update on Stuart Broad’s stiff back – suffice to say, he was walking like an old woman on his eventual arrival at the team hotel in Chittagong. The England squad had been expected in town at roughly 4pm this afternoon, but after several delays that turned into outright cancellations, they were still slogging through the traffic as the clock ticked round towards 9.

That’s not to say that the log-jam in Chittagong is anything like as bad as Dhaka. There’s a freshness to the town that’s not simply attributable to the massively smaller population. Whereas bicycle rickshaws in the capital flit through the crowds like grubby moths round a flame, here they have that little bit more room to spread their wings and tinkle like the butterflies that they so clearly deserve to resemble.

There’s a hint of a sea breeze with the port opening straight into the Bay of Bengal, and the beautiful but notorious hill tracts loom away to the East, to capture the clouds and keep the weather regulated. It’s still a city with its grime and its problems, of course, but it just seems an easier place to warm to than Dhaka. Or maybe that’s simply because I’m still amused by the sight of a woman having her skirt munched as she walked past a tethered goat.

Equally, it may be thanks to the mellifluous journey conducted by the majority of the media contingent. No more aeroplanes for the hacks on this trip. Instead, we embarked on a seven-hour train ride through the tranquillity of rural Bangladesh. It was a trip that proved to be the most restful half-day of the tour. Of course, it didn’t feel that way at first – after a late finish following the second ODI, a 6am alarm call was a cruel way to end part one of the tour. But at least at that hour, the Dhaka traffic was still light, and the route to the station was disarmingly uncrowded.

And suddenly, that was the end of the chaos. The doors slammed shut and the train prepared to roll out of town, and all that was left was to kick back and enjoy the ride. The departure was signalled in an unexpected fashion, as the chimes of Ben Ben floated out of the internal PA, door-bell style, before being pursued by a burst of Bangla music, but there was none of the free-for-all that characterised day-to-day Dhaka. It was as if we’d all been placed in stasis, hermetically sealed from the bustle of the outside world.

The progress was slow but stately, as the train chugged north at first, to circumvent the mouth of the mighty Meghna River, before looping round to cut through the paddy-fields and villages surrounding Brahmanbaria and Comilla. The landscape that whizzed past was lush and fertile, stretched flat for miles and comprised entirely of varying shades of green, except on the occasions when the earth would tumble away towards the sea, revealing the scars of industry and a ceaseless flow of trade.

The England camp now has the best part of a fortnight to put down roots in Bangladesh’s second city, and discover a life in a slightly slower lane. After all, it took them long enough to get here. There seems no point in rushing.