What now for game that bowled over a nation?
TThe Afghan cricket story was and is genuinely remarkable and deserving of celebration
HERE’S hardly a surfeit of positive news from Kabul currently, so let’s celebrate what we can.
The generally anti-sport Taliban have said they won’t disrupt the schedule of the Afghan men’s national cricket team.
And yes, of course there’s a crucial adjective in there, of which more later.
At present, though, September’s one-day series against Pakistan goes ahead, but in neutral Sri Lanka.
So, even more popularly, will the eighth year of the professional Twenty20 Shpageeza Cricket League – “an opportunity to bring the country together and some joy to the people”, reckons the cheerleading Afghan Cricket Board, apparently seriously.
Shpageeza – great word, isn’t it – but actually just Pashto language for ‘sixes’.
Our own Cricket Board has just completed its first, sort of genderequal, ‘Hundred’ tournament.
It included several (male) Afghans – headed by national captain and Trent Rockets’ star leg-spinner, Rashid Khan – and was catchily named and undeniably popular.
But big, brutal, spectator-threatening ‘sixes’ were what really got the crowds going.
Time for some historical reflection on just what remarkable reading even those few hesitant news items make – confirming how a nation that spurned cricket throughout a century of British colonial dominion over neighbouring India would embrace it under first a sport-hostile Taliban regime, then an American-backed Islamic one.
And they not just embraced it, but, against all odds, become seriously internationally good – acquiring skills initially in Pakistani refugee camps during the 1996-2001 Taliban occupation that they subsequently brought home following the US post-9/11 invasion.
As you just possibly don’t recall, I actually wrote a column on this Afghan cricket phenomenon back in 2009 in the then broadsheet Post.
But it wasn’t much of a ‘thing’ then, so I introduced it through then prominent international cricketers’ nicknames.
There was ‘Wheelie Bin’, Warwickshire’s admirable but less than mercurial Ashley Giles; and ‘Daisy’, the still outstanding but occasionally unpredictable Jimmy Anderson: some days he does (bowl well, take wickets), some days he doesn’t.
But best, I reckoned, were Australia’s Waugh twins. Captain Steve was ‘Tugga Waugh’, but his even more talented brother, Mark, had the much better nickname: ‘Afghan’ – the forgotten Waugh, referencing the war Australian troops, along with those of some 40 other nations, had been fighting then for a mere eight years.
Don’t get me wrong. I was not remotely suggesting that acquiring skills to win cricket matches, even increasingly international ones, rivalled achievements like the growing numbers of children, especially girls, attending school; extended healthcare access; falling infant and child mortality rates; or even increased road building.
It’s simply that the Afghan cricket story was and is genuinely remarkable and deserving of celebration.
Back then because the Afghanistan national team had just achieved the seriously valuable prize of One-Day International status, enabling them to play limited-overs internationals against the likes of England, Australia, India and the West Indies – the ‘big boys’.
Since when, they were awarded in 2017 full Test Match status – whereupon they quickly equalled Australia’s 140-year-old record of winning two of their first three Tests.
Oh yes, and in the aforementioned Rashid Khan, their 23-year-old captain, they have the top-ranked Twenty-20 bowler in the world. Not bad for latecomers.
But there’s much, much more.
The charitable arm of English cricket’s governing body, the Marylebone Cricket Club, working through the educational charity, Afghan Connection, runs an Afghan cricket project.
It builds schools, trains teachers, and – by providing cricket equipment, creating pitches, running training camps, and training coaches – enables tens of thousands of children to learn to play the great game, including the physically disabled, visually impaired... AND GIRLS.
And what, one rather dreads, will be happening to them while the men and boys are hitting their Shpageezas? So, one cheer at most!