Broken-hearted, not broken

On the day after a terrorist attack against two mosques, there was supposed to be a cricket match.

For one of the teams involved, formed by the Afghan Association, it was their first year in existence, and they had made the semifinal.

Then the shootings happened. Four team members were in the Masjid Al Noor, and all survived. One, however, lost his father, Matiullah Safi.

The semifinal, like many other sports events, was postponed for a week while the city remained in shock.

By the following Saturday, the team was still not ready to play. Their community was in mourning. They were going to default.

Instead, members of a lowergrade T20 team formed a side to play on their behalf. The makeshift side, some of whom had never played one-day cricket before, won, sending the Afghans to the final.

But a week later, the Afghan side still wasn’t ready. Family and friends had flown in from Afghanistan to support the closeknit community, which had lost two members, and it felt inappropriate to play cricket.

Once again, the makeshift side assembled to play the final. They looked set to lose: with their last two batsmen at the crease, they needed 48 runs.

They did it. On the last ball,

they won the match – in their first year, the

Afghan team won the competition.

‘‘Sometimes you feel a bit helpless when something as large-scale as that

[happens] and there’s not a hell of a lot you can do,’’ club captain

David Stack says.

‘‘This is one way the guys could help out.’’

While the semifinal took place, another cricket match was under way between Riccarton and Sumner, on the other side of the city.

The Riccarton team, unusually, had 14 players: so many wanted to honour a team-mate killed at the Masjid Al Noor that they had to make an exception.

‘‘They could have filled it three or four times over from people wanting to play to acknowledge Junaid,’’ says the club’s secretary, Tim Murdoch.

Junaid Ismail had lived in Christchurch since he was 5, and ran the Springs Road Dairy.

The dairy has become a focal point for grief in the community. It has been plastered with flowers, cards and messages of support.

Days after the massacre, regulars came in to support the family: some had known Junaid and his twin brother, Zahid, since they were boys.

For the past month, every day, rain or shine, one man has sat outside the dairy looking after the flowers.

He is Junaid’s father-in-law, who arrived from India to support his recently widowed daughter and her three young children.

The dairy itself is being run by Junaid’s family. His mother, Sara, was holding the fort alone on Friday.

‘‘We’ve had ups and downs,’’ she says, about life since her son was killed. ‘‘It’s been a wonderful response from the community. They’ve been very supportive.’’

If the attacks were like a stone dropped in water, casting ripples across the country and around the world, the waves were biggest at the point of impact.

The 50 victims, combined, left behind 33 spouses, 90 children, and more than 100 siblings, according to a Stuff analysis.

Many of the victims had large families, spanning multiple continents, comprising nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, grandparents and cousins. Among the dead were citizens of more than a dozen nations, as diverse as Malaysia, Syria, and Mauritius.

Twenty-seven victims were New Zealand citizens, and had forged vast and complex lives here as business owners, members of sports teams and community groups, as neighbours and colleagues and teachers and friends.

Four families lost multiple family members at once.

Mariam Gul, who lives in Pakistan, lost her brother and both her parents at the Linwood Masjid – her entire immediate family.

‘‘At first I was very sad – I was crying,’’ she says from her home in Karachi.

‘‘In our religion, when