When the Gas Rationing Timetable Rewrites the Football Clock in Islamabad and Rawalpindi

When the Gas Rationing Timetable Rewrites the Football Clock in Islamabad and Rawalpindi

Late at night at Old Trafford, long after the stands had emptied, the floodlights stayed on for nearly another hour. Paul, who has guarded that ground for twenty years, pushed his cart along the rows and gathered up what people had left behind. He told me that on nights with no match at all, he still hears cheering echoing back from the empty seats. I kept that line in my notebook for a long time. Only this week, reading the published gas-load-shedding schedule for the twin cities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, did I understand why it keeps coming back. Football, before it is a sport, is a timetable: a block of time carved out, framed, lit, and sold to somebody else. And what keeps that block of time alive at every level of this game is something no supporter buys a ticket to watch — energy supply.

Six thousand kilometres from Manchester, three load-shedding windows are being pasted onto the walls of residential neighbourhoods: from 6 am to 9 am, from 12 pm to 2 pm, and from 6 pm to 9.30 pm. The third window is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

In the northern Punjab plains, winter is the season of a single pipe. Cooking, hot water, heating — all of it runs into one system and all of it runs dry when the sun goes down. According to The Express Tribune report on the gas shortage in the twin cities, the utility SNGPL publishes a rotating schedule by residential locality, while residents record the actual hours of outage and then compare the two pieces of paper. The distance between the first sheet and the second sheet is where I want to stop, because football lives on exactly that kind of distance.

A published fixture list is a promise, and in sport every promise is tested by a clock.

The third window lasts three and a half hours, from 6 pm to 9.30 pm. In Islamabad and Rawalpindi, through December and January, the sun sets around 5 pm; by six, darkness has covered the grassroots pitches. Put another way, the last load-shedding window of the day overlaps precisely with the only hours in which a city can play football under lights. Add the three windows together and one locality can sit inside an outage for eight and a half hours a day. The 6 am to 9 am block takes the school hours. The 12 pm to 2 pm block takes the meal hours. The third block takes football.

In most cities, the football day does not happen in the morning. Adults finish work at five, students finish school at three, and both groups meet on a pitch at around six. Youth football, women's football, grassroots football — the tiers with no contracts, no medical department, no minibus — live entirely on that window. For them, light is not the ideal condition. Light is the only condition.

I have spent many evenings at the artificial pitches around Manchester, where the bounce of the ball on the surface sounds dry and even, like a machine. People rent those pitches by the hour, and what they are really buying is not the turf — it is three floodlight pylons. Based on my experience of watching matches across many different leagues, one plain conclusion holds: in grassroots football, the real currency is not money. It is lit hours.

A training session cut at the top still has a body. The first thirty minutes of any session are warm-up, running, short passing — the muscular part. The second half is where players are taught how to think: set-piece routines, transitions, decisions made while tired. When darkness lands exactly at six and there are no lights, the session contracts into its muscular half and loses its intellectual half. The youth of a football nation is not taken away by a shortage of talent; it is taken away by training sessions cut in two.

Then there is the part nobody films: the dressing room. Hot water, laundry, a warm meal after training. At small clubs, that is the entire recovery system. When the gas pipe closes at six in the evening, the club does not lose players to a rival. It loses them to fatigue.

Those with a generator keep two lit hours a week; those without one lose them. No index measures that gap, yet it works quietly across seasons: the club with power trains more, the club without power learns less, and when the two meet at eighteen, the distance between them is called talent.

Pakistan has produced names that climbed over all of that. Zesh Rehman, the first person of South Asian heritage to play in the Premier League, later captained the national team. Kaleemullah, a striker who went on to play in the United States. But a name is only the last visible part of a very long process that sits beneath the waterline, and the submerged part is thousands of lit evenings.

A blackout cancels a match, and then it dissolves the crowd. A father who wants to take his child to a six o'clock game needs three things: a lit road, a lit stand, and a safe feeling on the way home. Take all three away and the match can still be played, but it is played in front of empty seats. An empty seat still has somebody sitting in it — we simply no longer hear their applause.

Football has met this problem many times, and each time it has chosen one of three routes. England in the winter of 2026–2026, when power restrictions pushed matches into daylight, chose to move the hours. South Africa in 2026, when a country with chronic load-shedding still had to keep the lights on for a World Cup, chose to guarantee its own supply. Nepal, where outages lasted for years, chose to put solar panels on the roof of its training centre so youth teams could still work after dark. All three routes share one thing: nobody sat and waited for the grid to recover.

In Islamabad and Rawalpindi, a fourth route is forming without anyone's approval. When the stadium goes dark, football follows the light somewhere else: a school courtyard with its own generator, a stretch of concrete outside a shop, a mosque compound lit by a backup supply. The sport does not die when the power goes. It changes address, and it changes class along with it: children whose homes sit near a light source get to play, children further away get to watch.

On the Empty Seats project I made in Manchester, my method was simple: put the camera where an event does not happen, so the viewer hears the echo of the past on their own. Here I do not have to place a camera anywhere. From 6 pm to 9.30 pm, the whole city becomes a blank frame by itself.

The blind spot of this story lies in what we call it. Both cities are talking about gas, about cooking, about heating, and those things are true and urgent. But in the language of the football industry, this is a story about infrastructure. Federations budget for turf, for stands, for youth academies. Nobody budgets for the grid, because the grid belongs to a different ministry. Football's real infrastructure is not the pitch; it is the power line, and it is the one item for which nobody inside a football federation is accountable.

The second blind spot sits on the other side, in how we price young players. We build models with hundreds of variables for an eighteen-year-old: minutes played, touches, aerial duels, projected transfer value. None of those models asks a far simpler question: how many lit hours did he get each week, and for how many years. The visible part is measured very carefully; the submerged part is ignored entirely.

On the track, records are counted in hundredths of a second; outside it, a life is counted in breaths. English football is used to a match being decided by eight minutes of added time, and it easily forgets that in some places a season is decided by whether a city has lights on in December.

Before becoming a name, everyone is only a running figure. But a running figure needs a flat surface and a light source to survive the third, fourth and fifth winter. The work of a writer like me is not to switch the lights on. It is to record that a patch of darkness exists, that this darkness keeps specific hours, that it is pasted on a wall, and that it can be read.

What I am waiting for this winter is not a statement about gas. I am waiting for a fourth timetable — one that belongs neither to a power plant nor to a household, but to training sessions: which pitch has lights at which hour, who pays for those hours, and who writes them down. A football nation can survive without money for years. It cannot survive without an honest timetable.

A good match is never fully told; it only waits for someone quiet enough to hear it. But for a good match to exist, somebody first has to flick a switch. In Islamabad and Rawalpindi, that switch is being cut at six in the evening.