If cricket dies, Afghanistan will lose its global connect
There are people in the cricket world who can share neither name nor location with us. They have identities but they cannot be identified so they must get alternative names. They don’t care what they’re called, they just want the world, the sport that binds us together, to hear their voices.
Rostam, let’s call him that, goes into a room without windows because he’s speaking in Hindi and doesn’t want to be audible in the lane outside. “Everything is f **** d up. Last night was horrible just firing and firing,” he has messaged. Diba is hearing They are doing door-to-door searches and cricket equipment will give her away. Negar asks, “They will destroy us. Can we get our team out of the country?” Behind their voices, aircraft and gunfire is the surround sound.
This is Afghanistan and the They is the Taliban whose return to power has terrified its people and rendered impotent every institution that had been re-created over the last two decades. Cricket may fundamentally be ‘just a sport’ but for Afghanistan it has acquired great power. It has become an engine of movement, in a country constantly being broken down by war and drugs. Cricket is Afghanistan’s language of communication with the outside world.
Shafiq Stanikzai, former CEO of Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) now a consultant based out of Dubai says, “Cricket is an identity for us, it changed the perception about Afghans in the world.” earlier when he introduced himself as an Afghan “people were reluctant to interact with us, Afghans were linked to the gun, to terror, to fighting.” It was Afghan cricket he said, that “showed the world we are capable and through it, we could convince the international community to invest in Afghanistan’s talent not just in cricket. We are a talented people.”
Today talent is silenced and fear and rumour run around hand in hand. When I’m told that the Taliban have entered the ACB office, I’m incredulous. About five hours later, a photograph on social media shows gunmen in the ACB boardroom in the company of a former cricketer Abdullah Mazari. An ACB spokesperson, speaking to Reuters on Thursday said reassuringly, “The Taliban don’t have any issue or problem with cricket, and they have told us that we can continue our work as planned.”
The Taliban needed around nine days to take over Afghanistan, province after province, during which time the national team and the under-19 team were in a training camp at the Kabul International Stadium. The seniors, other than those active in The Hundred in the UK, were preparing for Afghanistan’s first bilateral series against Pakistan (3ODIS) to be held in Hambantota, Sri Lanka on Sept 3, 5 and 8, as part of qualification for the 2023 ICC World Cup. The U19 camp appears to have resumed, but there’s no confirmation. Hamayun Umar—that is his name and he says I must use it—is a former Afghanistan-a, List-a, first-class cricketer, in Jalalabad, who wakes up in shock every morning. “I still can’t believe how quickly the government has fallen. Everything that we had done, the good work that was going on, how can it change in a day?” The Spinghar Cricket Academy, which Hamayun runs with his younger brother Bashir, normally packed the year round with bookings done in advance, has emptied out in an instant.
“People are very afraid to come out, everyone is very tense. We don’t know how the situation will turn out.” There were rumours that many among the country’s crop of young cricketers was trying to leave the country but he remains hopeful. “I know that most of the Taliban, the majority I think, love cricket, not all of them, but a good number.” Hamayun’s optimism is unnerving, given that his playing career had been ended by a May 2018 bomb attack that killed eight and injured more than 45. The attack took place at the Sphingar Cricket Ground during a club match, Bashir rescuing Hamayun from the rubble. It took him three months to recover from serious shrapnel injuries, 14 in his right leg, and seven more between his back and abdomen, but the muscle strength in his legs needed to continue cricket was gone.
A few weeks ago, the brothers, who co-own the Sphingar Cricket Ground, had been planning their first post-attack event. When fighting broke out in the area, the brothers realised no one had claimed responsibility or tried to find out who had carried out the 2018 attack and so they shelved their plans. Then the Taliban arrived.
Rostam, who has taken the Afghanistan flag off his Facebook page says, “Every institution is closed, the government, businesses, private organisations, the bazaar is empty, everything is down. There is no system. We’re waiting for a committee to set up a government and then we will know their rules.” He has worked in Afghan cricket actively for years, and says, “Taliban are saying they will go by Islamic rules and if these are the rules, then women’s cricket is stopped already.”
It is what is haunts Diba and Negar. The Afghan women’s cricket team was a work in active progress, a fledgling story of wonder and hope. Over the last four years, the team was taking shape, with structures and talent identified, a time slot set aside during the day for training at the national indoor academy as well as budgetary allowances for their development. This is sounding like a vague, waffly plan because it is all that can be told. To put down detailed place marks on this pathway is to risk the lives of those involved. We did not imagine this could happen when writing about cricket. But silence now is the only trade-off against the impending, brutal invisibility.
A query with the ACB goes unanswered. From Dubai, Stanikzai was not surprised by the Taliban take over but its speed, “now the question is how the world will see this new government structure, whether it will be acceptable to the international community.” With cricket, the fear is of abandonment, he says. Like when it began 1995, under the Taliban rule when Afghans could only travel to play in Peshawar, as only Pakistan recognised the Taliban government. “Will it happen again?” he asks. “It’s a traumatic possibility.”
Cricket’s most romantic fairy tale today must deal with not merely a nightmare, but the arrival of a real-life monster who could write an unspeakable ending.