"The worst experience," Aaqib Javed says without hesitation "was Bangalore."
We're standing behind the practice nets at the National Cricket Academy in the Gaddafi Stadium. A young hopeful from regional Punjab is trying to impress Aaqib, Pakistan's interim head coach. It's a lovely winter's day, the sun washing over the ground without yet carrying the oppressive potency it will gain in a few weeks. There's machinery and construction equipment all around. Pakistan's most famous cricket stadium, with its iconic Mughal façade, is being torn down and rebuilt to service the demands of the 21st century and of the upcoming Champions Trophy.
It's a fitting time to reminisce, and Aaqib is thinking about that 1996 quarter-final. "If you look at the stadium," he says, about the Chinnaswamy, "the stands are right on top of you. If there was any flashpoint, or if anything notable happened, the din was unimaginable. It was so loud that our ears continued ringing the next day."
Bangalore's crowd on the day will take that as a compliment, and in truth, they had much to shout about that night. India beat Pakistan in a feisty encounter, ending Pakistan's defence of their World Cup title and their dreams of lifting cricket's biggest trophy on their own patch, at the Gaddafi Stadium, where the final was held.
The 1996 World Cup was perhaps the last major cricket tournament of a sepia-tinted era, before modernity arrived on cricket's doorstep at the turn of the century. Aaqib, and Pakistan, look upon it with a special kind of fondness for a very particular reason: it remains - at least until the Champions Trophy kicks off on 19 February - the last ICC event Pakistan has hosted.
"I have good memories of that WC," Aaqib says. "We played a few matches in Lahore. It was completely normal in terms of security, both in India and Pakistan. When we went to India, it was all very relaxed there too.
Aaqib has good reason for his happy memories. Pakistan were among the strongest starters in the tournament, and played all their group matches at home. They won all four games he played in, losing just the one to South Africa where he was absent, and finished second in their group.
Much of the feel-good factor had little to do with the cricket itself but where it was played. The subcontinent was a nascent cricketing power hub at the time. Pakistan and India co-hosted the 1987 World Cup; this time around, Sri Lanka joined them. Pakistan's fans had begun to enjoy the taste of high-profile cricket they were getting, Lahore, Karachi and Gujranwala were packed to the brim; according to Aaqib, there wasn't any standing room left. Pakistan believed the floodgates would open in the years that followed. A parching drought, instead, has seen them go more than a generation without a similar event, to the extent that most Pakistanis have no memories of what hosting such a tournament is like.
Ehsan Mani, a recent PCB chairman and former president of the ICC, does. He was directly involved in the management of the 1996 World Cup. As a member of the Pak-Indo-Lanka Joint Management Committee (PILCOM), the advisory committee for the tournament, he has fond memories of what he remembers as a constructive relationship with his counterparts in India and Sri Lanka.
"In 1987, India took the lead," he says. "In 1996, Pakistan took the lead. We played a big part in actually getting the hosting rights. The difference at the time was, India wanted to work with us, and there was a lot of mutual respect between us. The world was different. India-Pakistan matches were the largest in the world then too, but India didn't have as much money in those days. In fact, Pakistan was more or less equal in reserves and profits to India. The dynamics were very different."
Mani views his partnership with the late Jagmohan Dalmiya as instrumental to the success of that 1987 tournament, recalling they used to speak "four or five times a day". Dalmiya worked on the commercial side and Mani handled the media aspect. The tournament ran into headwinds early, with an issue Pakistan have over the years become accustomed to needing to handle: security concerns.
Back then, though, those concerns affected Sri Lanka, which was in the midst of a civil war, with Australia and West Indies refusing to send their teams to the country. Mani recalls how Pakistan and India stood up for South Asia's new emerging cricketing nation.
In February that year, Pakistan and India put together a joint team - six Pakistanis and five Indians, captained by Mohammad Azharuddin, who played an ODI against a Sri Lankan XI in Colombo, to show how safe the country was for cricket.
"It was about personal relationships with our counterparts" Mani says. "We got on well with each other. There were certain government policies that made things complicated, but when you get on well at board level, it eases things."
In the end, Australia and West Indies didn't go to Sri Lanka anyway, but the tournament ticked along nicely. Sri Lanka won their other three matches and eased into the quarter-final, as did Pakistan and India, who met each other in that Bangalore cauldron. Pakistan captain Wasim Akram famously pulled out of that match.
"Pakistan were looking very strong at the time," Aaqib says. "In that India game, Wasim Akram dropping out at the last minute was a huge blow. We found out at the toss he wasn't playing. When your captain, and a bowler like Wasim Akram, is suddenly unavailable, it has a huge effect on morale because we had no strategic or mental way of preparing for it. I don't understand what happened there but it definitely hurt us."
There was a further flashpoint when Aamer Sohail sledged Venkatesh Prasad during a strong Pakistan response to a stiff target, only to be cleaned up next delivery and for Pakistan's chase to eventually fall apart. In Akram's absence, Aaqib says " we just conceded too many runs. 280-odd was too much. We could have coped around 250-260 - at the time that was what was considered chase-able."
While any animosity between the two sides remained on the field, Mani believes all of that had changed markedly by the time he became chairman in 2018. "Our relationship aged poorly. When Sourav Ganguly became BCCI president, we felt he was effectively a frontman for Jay Shah [who served as the Asian Cricket Council president at the time]. Things were not very good."
The PCB was awarded the 2025 Champions Trophy weeks after Mani left the PCB. Pakistan had also put in a joint bid for a T20 World Cup with the UAE, as well as for the 2031 ODI World Cup with Bangladesh, but neither ultimately ended up successful. It is something Mani says he's disappointed the PCB did not actively follow up on after he left.
As a result, the PCB, as well as Pakistan at large, have thrown their entire investment - financial and emotional - into the Champions Trophy. Though stadium upgradations were left until the 11th hour, no expense was spared in razing Gaddafi Stadium to the ground and building it anew, while renovations of varying degrees have taken place in Karachi and Rawalpindi. At the same time, the PCB pushed India harder than they ever have in the past in an attempt to ensure the entire tournament took place in Pakistan.
It didn't ultimately happen, and the UAE had to be roped in as a venue for all of India's games. As such, Pakistan find themselves in a farcical situation: Lahore hosted the 1996 World Cup final, a tournament Pakistan co-hosted with India and Sri Lanka, but may not host the final of this event, officially awarded solely to Pakistan.
"As soon as the ICC awarded events to India and Pakistan, the ICC should have got involved," Mani says. "It [the negotiation about India] should have nothing to do with the PCB. It was an ICC event. Greg Barclay [then ICC chairman] should have dealt with it.
"If you remember, Pakistan and India were not playing cricket before 2004 for many years. Pakistan had Mr Shaharyar Khan as the chairman, who was highly respected by the BCCI and everyone else. I went to India as ICC chairman and said we should not mix cricket with politics. And when I went to meet the ministers in India, the BCCI board members used to come with me to these government meetings and support what I was saying. It was a different world."
Though 1996 remains Pakistan's most recent reference point, Aaqib in his position as the current side's coach cautions against assigning too much weight to it. "The biggest mistake you can make in such an event is when you start treating it as a special event. You end up making the wrong team and break your continuity. Look at the T20 World Cup last year - we brought back players who haven't played in ages. Mohammad Amir came in, Imad [Wasim] came in, Shadab [Khan] batted at four, Imad at five, it became a bit of a mess."
In a quirk of fate, Pakistan are official hosts of an event they go into as defending champions, just as they were last time around, in 1996. And though Pakistan have long viewed that '90s side as something of a quixotic ideal, Aaqib thinks at least part of the reason why it is regarded that way is nostalgia.
"That side had bigger names," he concedes. "Those huge names are absent from our current side. But when Wasim didn't play that quarter-final, there was a huge drop-off in terms of quality. Now you won't feel one absence forces you to drop so far down skill-wise. Javed Miandad and Saleem Malik were fading away, and that was an ageing team that hadn't been refreshed after 1992."
It is also the time, perhaps, from which disillusioned Pakistan cricket followers hail in their greatest concentration. Pakistan is a young country; the average age is less than 21. Stories of Pakistan's cricket team from the '90s - one of cricket's most charismatic and enigmatic sides - are often filtered through the lenses of former fans, who rode the high of '92, enjoyed the optimism of the rest of the decade, and signed off when it became clear Pakistan were not so much on the cusp of a golden age as on the crest of a wave that was soon to crash. Current fans have heard, but cannot verify, that that was when following Pakistan cricket was truly worth it.
The 1996 World Cup, when cricket came home, is perhaps something of a psychological shortcut to that time, one not available to those who came after. "I think cricket fever is just as high now, if not higher," Aaqib says. "Especially with social media and the hype that it can create. And the average fan's cricket sense has increased. When cricket's on, everything else shuts down, TV dramas, other programmes and all the rest."
And unlike those who saw that tournament through a heady, optimistic lens of what the future held, Pakistan now know how rare these moments are. There isn't another men's ICC event slated in the calendar for them to host, and each one invariably comes with the added complication of India's refusal to travel.
So if Aaqib believes Pakistan shouldn't treat it as a special tournament, he will have his work cut out convincing everyone else.