Come a long way, now there’s a new challenge
Khan, who had run a cricket academy outside of Kabul,” Frawley tells The Cricket Paper.
“I was driving into London and they were heading in from Tooting. I just heard all these things going crazy, so I called them up and said that I didn’t know what was going on but think it would be best if we both turned around and went home.
“We met up two days later and Taj asked me if I could bring the Afghanistan team to the UK. I told him it was definitely something worth looking into.
“He told me he wanted them here the following year, which was obviously a pretty tight deadline.”
Frawley’s biggest headache was finding the right opposition for an international team that was, at that time, still shrouded in mystery. He also had to ensure that people believed war-torn Afghanistan had a side at all.
“I was never sure what kind of level the team would be turning up at – I didn’t know whether to go village, county seconds, you name it,” he says. “In the end, we did a mixture of both. I spoke to Goochy (Graham Gooch) about a possible match against Essex and I remember him raising his eyebrows in puzzlement when I mentioned Afghanistan.
“The warm-ups weren’t that strong but the talent was there. There was no holding back either, every ball was going to go for six or going to be bowled as quickly as possible.”
Afghanistan won five out of six matches on the tour, losing to Loughborough but crushing the rest. Mohammed Nabi and Hamid Hassan, two of the touring party, were invited to stay on for another month to receive coaching and play for the MCC.
Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president between 2004 and 2014, was continually on the phone asking for updates. Such was the interest that the team returned to a tickertape welcome.
“Or the equivalent of it,” says Frawley. “There were just a few more Kalashnikovs.”
The reception they’ll receive after a first Test win should be well worth witnessing.