DESPERATION TO WINPUTSAFGHANS INTHEDOCKAGAIN
AFGHANISTAN are cricket’s great feelgood story over the last decade.Yet among their associate rivals, they are strikingly unpopular. At the World T20 qualifiers in Ireland and Scotland last year, I was struck by the ill-feeling towards them. Before their play-off match against Papua New Guinea, all the other teams seemed united in their desire for Afghanistan to lose.
Winners tend to be unpopular, and Afghanistan have done an awful lot of it in associate cricket since they first reached a world event in 2010. Ludicrously, some have also resented Afghanistan for being ‘Pakistan A’: a reference to how many Afghans learnt the game in Pakistan, though those who make this jibe forget that this was not out of choice but because the Afghans were refugees.
There is also an underlying feeling that Afghanistan are willing to bend the rules to win: bullying opposing players on and off the pitch; intimidating umpires with relentless appealing, and being willing to exploit any loophole in the rules to help themselves win.
Afghanistan’s desperation to win has always made them unpopular, dating right back to 2008, when they won the World Cricket League Division Five tournament in Jersey, a crucial staging post in their ascent. “You could see how much they wanted to win,” Matt Hague, who captained Jersey in the tournament, recalled. “We thought they were a little bit arrogant.”
Once more Afghanistan find themselves resented, but this time they only have themselves to blame. In the fourth ODI of their series with Ireland, Ed Joyce creamed a drive through the covers and over the ropes for four. At least he thought he had: judge for yourself from the photo, left, whether Mohammad Nabi was over the boundary when he flicked the ball back.
Joyce was then run out off the same delivery, understandably assuming the ball would go for four.
After Afghanistan appealed for his dismissal, the umpires asked them if they wanted to withdraw their appeal. They did not and Afghanistan went on to win the game; Nabi later received an official reprimand for breaching the ICC Code of Conduct. And so an enthralling series between the two leading associates ended up being defined by this one unsavoury incident, and not any of the fine cricket played by both sides.