Howzat! Cricket brings hope, joy to war-torn Kabul

IT’S CALLED the Shpageeza Cricket League. Shpageeza means “sixer” in Pashto, the local dialect.

It was early afternoon, in a match between Boost Defenders and Mis Ainak Knights, when a massive thud of noise filled the air, overpowering everything else and grinding the game to a shuddering halt.

It wasn’t like thunder, more a tidal wave of sound. When it roared across the ground and hit the windows of our commentary box, I thought the end of the world had come.

The players all hit the deck. Who knows what was going through their minds? I jumped up out of my seat and considered which way to run.

The fear was real; it was terrifying and the sudden sense that your life is in genuine danger is a feeling I will never forget.

We were in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan. It was the sixth match of the SCL, which was established in 2013 by the Afghanistan Cricket Board in a fitting response to the rapid growth of Twenty20 cricket – and cricket overall – in that extraordinary country.

It’s hard to believe that only 20 or so years ago there was barely any interest in cricket in Afghanistan. It was soccer, soccer, soccer, and daylight second. Remarkably, after all that the people have been through since 2001, cricket has risen to become the country’s main sport. It’s become an escape from the chaos of everyday life and an emerging shop front for the nation on the world stage.

It turned out the blast that shook us from that escape was the horrid sound of a suicide bomber detonation about 70 metres from our comm box. The bomber had tried to get into the ground but was prevented by security at the gate where I’d been driven into the stadium earlier that day.

Three people were killed in the blast and several others injured. Had the bomber entered the ground, the tragedy would almost certainly have been multiplied many times over.

The attack, it was soon reported, was carried out by Islamic State.

Coming that close to something you’ve only heard about on the news was an enlightening experience as much as it was frightening.

My response in the hours afterwards was to work out how

I could get out of the country as quickly as possible and return to the tranquility of Melbourne. Several of the overseas players in the league fled. But I soon realised that leaving was not the answer.

Firstly, I’d always believed it hypocritical of cricketers to refuse to travel to Pakistan or Afghanistan because of the threat of terrorism but would happily go to London, which has also been affected by terrorism. Apart from that, from a cricketing point of view, these people were now our brothers and I felt we owed it to them to show our support.

I wanted to do my small part to show them that I admired their determination to embrace our game, in the face of all the threats and dangers, and recognise that they had found some of the enjoyment through cricket that we had always taken for granted.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, coaching at Islamabad United in Pakistan’s T20 competition, and commentating. I was caretaker coach for the Afghanistan national team for a couple of months last year and, despite the brief experience, gained a rare insight into the country, the people and what cricket means to them.

What I found was a population of immeasurable strength. There is no point trying to relate to what they’ve been through. It’s simply not possible.

When I hear sports people talk about their career or the match they just played in being like a war zone, I shake my head. There is no comparison. And once you meet people who have lived through what the Afghan people have experienced, you realise that equating sport to war is a massive insult.

Cricket is pointing a ray of sunshine on Afghanistan and you can expect that ray to keep getting brighter. When the Big Bash League gets underway, there will be literally millions of Afghans willing on their golden duo, Rashid Khan, pictured, and Mohammad Nabi, to do well.

Try to picture 30, 40, maybe 50 people crowded around a television in the towns and cities watching Rashid bowling his leggies for the Adelaide Strikers or Nabi doing his thing for the Melbourne Renegades. Nabi is revered in his home country as the experienced leader who helped bring the game out of the wilderness there.

Rashid is the young gun from Jalalabad who has risen to become the No1 ranked T20 bowler in the world. Take that in: a 20-year-old from Afghanistan is the best Twenty20 bowler in world cricket. I think it’s an achievement that should be celebrated right across the game.

It’s not just in Twenty20 that they’ve developed so impressively. The national team will be at the 50-over World Cup in England next year after winning a qualifying tournament in Zimbabwe and recently played its firstever Test match, against India.

It means the Afghanistan Cricket Board will receive $100 million over the next seven years, as they’re now a fully-fledged Test-playing nation. The possibilities are endless and I think it’s great.

As much as it will be terrific to watch Rashid and Nabi play in Australia again, it’s worth reflecting on the immense pressure they’ll be under. Well beyond the desire to do well personally and for their teams, they will shoulder the expectations of a hopeful nation.

They will be envoys, to some extent, willed on by the people of Afghanistan, who want to show the world that they are a nation of good people, a nation that has something to offer the world. In a cricket environment that’s had so many problems of late, there is no better story than this.

When I was coaching the team, we went to Hong Kong for the Intercontinental Cup. On a day off, we climbed Victoria Peak, which looks over the city. It was warm and muggy, as Hong Kong weather tends to be, and it was pretty hard work getting to the top.

The boys are usually good at that sort of stuff. Afghanistan is full of hills and most of the fellas are conditioned to walking up and down inclines. But they were certainly blowing after the walk. I know I was!

When we got to the top, the thought struck me that our morning had been a great metaphor for what these boys had been through. Any cricketer in the world playing at international standard has been through trials and tribulations. But there is a different dimension to what these chaps have been through. Sheer determination is at the heart of their struggle.

A kid like Rashid has known nothing but life in a war zone. Yet, he has never accepted no for an answer. He is kind, considerate and always has a smile on his face. He applies himself to his game with incredible determination. He is fit and strong.

He is always willing to speak to goras – white people, like me – and pick their brains about how to get more out of his cricket and life in general. He is a magnificent cricketer who will captain Afghanistan in years to come and will take them to the next level.

Some of the guys he plays with at home don’t earn 50 bucks a month, but Rashid has shown them what’s possible. His IPL contract with Sunrisers Hyderabad is worth about a million Australian dollars a season.

I got only a small taste of what life has been like for Rashid and his Afghanistan team-mates. But it made a big impact on me. They live with fear everyday or, at least, things most people would find unusual. In Kabul, for example, when you look to the sky at any time of day you see three or four gigantic blimps cruising over the city.

They’re scanning for any signs of something amiss, something threatening or dangerous. They’re taking photos, using x-ray cameras, infrared – who knows? They are security blimps put up there by the United States.

Looking up and seeing those aircraft felt eerie to me and I can’t decide if I felt safer or more unsettled because of them. But the people of Kabul are unmoved. They carry on as if the blimps aren’t there.

These experiences and memories have given me an unshakeable respect for Afghanistan, its people and its cricketers. I like to play golf. Cruising up and down fairways, breathing fresh air and challenging myself to get better at the game serves as a perfect tonic for the pressures I go through in my everyday life.

But these days, when I get out onto the course, I have that little bit extra appreciation for the peace I and most Australians have always taken as a given.

Afghanistan’s determination to join the cricketing world is something we should all celebrate during the BBL this summer and beyond. Despite all the obstacles, they’ve built a decent system of first-class cricket. They now have five first-class grounds and are becoming a legitimate T20 power, ranked above Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and others.

There will be more to come. There is exceptional raw talent within their ranks that just needs to be polished. It takes a little while – India took 45 Tests before they claimed their first win. What Afghanistan has done inside the past two years has been nothing short of remarkable.

‘The fear was real, it was terrifying, and the sense that your life is in danger is a feeling I’ll never forget’

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