by Tim Wigmore
Afghanistan aims to play Test cricket – and not at some mythical point in the future, but as soon as 2018 when the ICC Test Challenge, pitting the lowest-ranking Test nation against the winners of the Intercontinental Cup, is scheduled.
Afghanistan also needs Test cricket to prevent an exodus of its best players to Pakistan, as has happened with the best Irish players leaving for England. Wicketkeeper Mohammad Shazhad was initially reluctant to play for Afghanistan: he qualified for Pakistan too, which offered him the only possible route into Test cricket. Afghanistan’s associate opponents have often complained that the side has an unfair advantage because so many of their players have connections with Pakistan.
Sensitive to this, the Afghan Cricket Board pushes players to speak Pashtu in interviews rather than Urdu, to show it is for Afghans rather than Pakistanis. The links between the first generation of Afghanistan’s side and the Peshawar refugee camps also raises a question: can the Afghan structure produce players of the calibre of those who were exposed to the Pakistani club scene?
There are significant reasons to think that it can. While for most Afghans cricket exists as a game played with a tape ball wherever space can be found – from narrow streets to the promenade of the Darul Aman Palace on the edge of Kabul – the game is becoming increasingly structured. There are over 80 grounds in Afghanistan, including more than 50 turf wickets. The country has around 500 cricket clubs, including leagues in 32 of the 34 provinces.
Even before the Test Challenge was floated, the Afghan Cricket Board had plans to extend the duration of the two-innings regional tournament from three to four days. The new format began in October 2014. Afghanistan was ahead of its great associate rival, Ireland – as well as Sri Lanka – in introducing a four-day domestic structure. Bangladesh only formed a multi-day structure after it had been awarded Test status.
The domestic Twenty20 competition, the Etisalat Sixes, has been an astounding success. A capacity crowd of more than 10,000 watched the final – ticket prices were doubled from the final in 2013 but that proved no deterrent – and thousands more were turned away at the gates. The Etisalat Sixes are also a ubiquitous presence on television sets in Afghanistan. Perhaps optimistically, the Afghan Cricket Board claimed that 12m people watched the final in 2014.
Though its funding remains trivial by comparison with the Test-playing nations, the Afghan Cricket Board has put in place a good structure for nurturing players. As it has grown, so it has been able to improve ways of identifying talent, especially outside the main cricketing hubs. While the concentration of players from near the border with Pakistan remains, cricket’s popularity is also growing in the north. The quick bowler Mirwais Ashraf hails from Kunduz, a city in the north of the country, near Tajikistan, that has become a focal point for fighting between the Taliban and the Afghan security forces. The board contracts 43 professional players, including five under-19 players.
One of those who recently progressed through the Afghan youth structure is Usman Ghani. At the age of 17 he scored an ODI century against Zimbabwe, opening the innings. Five months earlier, he had been a member of the Afghanistan side that defeated Australia and Sri Lanka in the Under-19 World Cup in 2014. The results served as notice to the world of the abundant talent that exists below the Afghanistan national side, even if the exact ages of several players have been questioned.
The increased professionalism and popularity of Afghan cricket has lent it an entirely different character. Gone is the motley bunch who played in Jersey in 2008, receiving only travel, accommodation and a very modest allowance in return. In their place are Afghan celebrities who are not shy of monetising their talents.
The changes have not pleased everyone. ‘When I was captain in that time our players were hungry to play cricket,’ Raees Ahmadzai said. ‘Now players have contracts and make good money. When going on tour players have daily allowances and stay in five-star hotels so players’ lifestyles have changed.’
Taj Malik did not begrudge the players their riches. ‘I’m happy that they’re playing on a good level, they have good salaries, they don’t have economic problems. They have model cars.’
Yet, to him, professionalism has come at a price: the essence of Afghan cricket has been lost. His cricketing philosophy is encapsulated by his favourite game, against the UAE in the Asian Cricket Council Twenty20 tournament in 2009. Afghanistan needed ten to win from the final two balls with their last pair at the crease. ‘I shouted at Hameed to not go down the track and stay in the crease and hit it very far. The first ball he hit for four and the last for six and we won.’
He was desperate for Afghanistan to replicate such feats today. ‘Our style was just like the style which the West Indies have. We hit boundaries and have the big hitters and score a lot of runs hitting sixes and fours. In this style we win so many games from 2002 to 2009 everywhere in the world.’
Although he has moved on from his life in cricket, Taj has lost none of his bluster. ‘If I was there, I’m sure, with the help of Allah, we would be the number five or number six team in the world today.’ As Afghanistan’s rise continues, Taj does not deserve his role to be written out of history. If he has anything to do with it, there is no chance of that happening.
While Afghanistan’s players have become celebrated athletes in their own country, and the side has become increasingly consistent – in 2013, they were the runners-up to Ireland in the flagship associate competitions in all three formats of the game – Afghan cricket remains in a curious sort of limbo.
Much of this is the result of the country’s unique circumstances. ‘The biggest barrier to Afghanistan’s cricket will be Afghanistan the country,’ an ICC source told me. It could be many years before any country is happy to tour Afghanistan, for all the board’s protestations that it would be safe to do so. The ground in Kabul, where the national squad trains, is flanked by up to ten armed guards. But that is not the only complication.
‘The advice I am getting is that it’s not the Taliban wanting to shoot you, the danger around Kabul is kidnap,’ Afghanistan’s new coach, the Englishman Andy Moles, told The Telegraph. ‘There are armed guards at the hotel I am staying at and also at the bank next door. So you get used to seeing AK47s every day.’
Yet Afghanistan are also hindered by the lack of altruism and ambitious vision from the cartel that runs cricket. Their fixture list lacks coherence and structure, deterring sponsors. The cricketing world is always happy to share the credit for Afghanistan’s success but is rather less enthusiastic to help them.
The complex visa rules in English county cricket, for instance, act as a de facto ban on Afghans playing professional cricket in the country. Essex, Kent and Lancashire were interested in signing Hassan and Nabi after their fine performances for MCC against Nottinghamshire in 2011 but were dissuaded by the complexity of the process. Bangladesh and Pakistan are the only Test-playing countries that have had Afghan players in their professional leagues.
Most critically, Afghanistan remain completely reliant on the goodwill of full members to get games outside of the World Cup and World Twenty20. Even these opportunities are being reduced. After 2015, the World Cup will be restricted to ten teams. The main World Twenty20 has also been scaled back to ten sides and will now take place every four years rather than every two. Unless the full members become more amenable to giving Afghanistan playing opportunities, it will impose a glass ceiling on cricket’s growth.
‘It will frustrate the audience in the country,’ Dr Muhammad warned. ‘It should be their (the full members’) social responsibility as well to promote this game if they want peace and stability in this country.’
With cricket unique among sports in wishing to contract the size of its World Cup, Afghanistan’s tournament debut threatens to be their last appearance in spite of their on-field improvements. Administrators have no time for fairytales.
The neglect of Afghanistan, rooted in the short-term greed of the ‘big three’, would be shameful. Cricket
has repeatedly shown that its importance in Afghanistan stretches far beyond the pitch.
‘The young generation is coming together and supporting the Afghan cricket team. From bad things like fighting and drugs, they leave everything and they support the team and they play cricket as well,’ Nabi told me. ‘It’s the main role of playing cricket in Afghanistan – it brings peace to every tribe.’
Afghanistan’s qualification for the World Cup is a brilliant story – the greatest testimony yet to the vision of Bob Woolmer in pioneering the ICC’s development programme. ‘It’s not something that would happen in real life,’ Kabir reflected. ‘Most of the time I say that this type of story only happens in films. It’s not very easy to believe it when I see it, but it happened. I’ve never heard or seen anything like this before in my life.’
For all the uncertainties that lie ahead, cricket has been a powerful unifying force in the country. Afghanistan’s success in its national sport has projected a positive image of the country to the rest of the world – and enriched the game of cricket in the process. Afghanistan are no ragtag bunch of cricketers, but a serious international side. Cries of ‘Afghanistan, zindabad’ are now imbued with expectation.
Ireland by Tim Wigmore
IT took a coin toss to wake Irish cricket out of its slumber. The date was 17 March 2007. Ireland were playing in their first World Cup. Few Irishmen realised it until a pulsating tie against Zimbabwe two days earlier which earned a front-page photograph in The Irish Times.
Now they faced Pakistan. Ireland were given all the St Patrick’s Day cheer they needed when they saw the pitch: as green as the leprechaun outfits worn by their supporters. When captain Trent Johnston won the toss, suddenly there was the whiff of an upset in the air.
Some couldn’t help sneering. ‘When we walked out on to the field there was a group of Pakistani supporters on the right-hand side and they were giving us all sorts of stick,’ Johnston has since recalled. ‘“You should be back in the pub and you should be drinking Guinness celebrating St Patrick’s Day. You don’t play cricket,” and all that. And you just saw the guys growing an extra inch.’
Six balls into Pakistan’s innings, another of Ireland’s Australian-born players, Dave Langford-Smith, celebrated: Pakistan’s opener Mohammad Hafeez had edged behind. Ireland were beginning to believe.
Seven years earlier, Andre Botha left a brief first-class career in South Africa to move to Ireland. He had to get time off from his job as a delivery driver to go to the World Cup. Yet he produced the second-most economical spell in World Cup history.
Bowling wicket-to-wicket at a pace that would not disturb motorway speed cameras, eight overs of skill and precision, mixing seam, cutters and slower balls, yielded only five runs. He snared Imran Nazir and, crucially, Pakistan’s captain Inzamam-ul-Haq.
‘Early on in his innings he got stuck at the crease. We had to get it up a bit fuller than normal. With the wicket moving off the seam and the ball coming out of the hand pretty well it worked,’ Botha reflected: Inzamam edged obligingly to first slip. ‘I probably did it once or twice in my career when I could move the ball both ways. All the balls on the day came out the way I wanted. If I could bowl like that every day cricket would have been easy.’
Johnston played his part too: seven miserly overs, and two catches. The second, as Johnston ended flat out on the turf but with the ball safely in his outstretched hands after running over his shoulder from mid-on, was vindication for the coach Adi Birrell.
Knowing that Ireland could not hope to match Test sides in their batting or bowling, he vowed, ‘The one area we could compete was our fielding.’ As simple as Ireland’s mantra was – ‘No no-balls, no wides and bowl straight at the stumps’ – they had bowled Pakistan out for 132. Overhaul that, and they would not only beat a Test nation. They would eliminate Pakistan from the tournament and progress, at their expense, to the knockout stages.
They would be the hardest runs that Ireland would ever have to score and Johnston knew it. During the break between the innings, he gave what several players call a ‘Churchillian’ speech. Johnston bounded around the changing room, topless and with a look of raw intensity in his eyes.
‘Now we have a chance to go to the Super 8s. We have a massive f***ing chance to stay in the West Indies for an extra four weeks,’ he bellowed. ‘It’s up to every single one of us, and see how much we want to f***ing stay here. I can promise you that it’s gonna be tough out there.’
Johnston went to every player in the Ireland dressing room, reminding them of the stakes if they lost: a return to their mundane existences as teachers, postmen and farmers. Only two had professional cricketing contracts. ‘I sure as hell don’t want to go back and sell fabric,’ he told his team.
But it didn’t look like Ireland would be staying much longer. With so few runs to defend, Pakistan resorted to bowling with primal intensity. The Irish batsmen had faced nothing like it. ‘We were really confident that we could knock the runs off, perhaps a bit naive as to what we were coming up against,’ opening batsman William Porterfield admitted. ‘Mohammad Sami was bowling at 90mph and a lot of us hadn’t really come up against 90mph bowling.’
Porterfield survived Sami’s opening onslaught but he was rendered strokeless: he took 49 balls over his 13 runs. Still, that was more than Jeremy Bray and Eoin Morgan managed combined, and Ireland were 15/2 when Niall O’Brien came to the wicket. While he was one of only three Ireland players who had first-class county experience, O’Brien didn’t seem like the man for this situation.
Two days earlier against Zimbabwe, he had made only one run before tamely poking behind. Birrell was under pressure to drop O’Brien, or at least move him down the order. ‘I was batting very badly,’ he remembered. ‘My confidence was very, very low going into the game, so much so that I didn’t even have a net the day before because I didn’t want it to get any worse.’
O’Brien chose a good day to remember how to bat. ‘From ball one, the ball was coming off the middle of the bat. I was hitting the ball well, hitting the ball into gaps. I always thought that as long as I batted, we’d win the game.’
Ireland had never before beaten a Test-playing nation in an official ODI. Rather than glibly claim that he was focused only on the next ball, O’Brien reflected that he ‘was very clued-in to how important the fixture was and how important it was we got the victory’. He moved past 50, scoring almost 80 per cent of Ireland’s runs while at the crease. Even a break for rain and bad light did not deter him. ‘I felt like I wasn’t going to get out, I was insurmountable.’ To prove the point, he hit Pakistan off-spinner Shoaib Malik over long-on for six, taking Ireland’s target down to 20 runs with six wickets in hand.
Defeat from that position wouldn’t have been a heroic loss. It would have been a choke. O’Brien ‘had a bit of a rush of blood to the head and tried to hit Malik for another six’. He was stumped attempting to hit Malik out of Sabina Park and perhaps all of Jamaica. In the next over Iftikhar Anjum took wickets in consecutive balls, and Ireland needed 15 runs with only three wickets remaining.
Niall’s brother, Kevin, chose a good moment to play the most uncharacteristic innings of his career. He crawled to 16 off 52 balls and, in Johnston, found a reliable ally. It was Johnston, fittingly, who sealed the win, harrumphing a six over long-on.
It had only taken 275 years for Ireland to make their mark on cricket. The sport was played at Phoenix Park, in Dublin, as far back as 1730. After 1792, when the Military of Ireland played the Gentlemen of Ireland – including the future Duke of Wellington – at Phoenix Park, it began to permeate the Irish consciousness, extending its reach beyond society’s elite.
By around 1860 cricket was the most popular sport in Ireland, according to The Oxford Companion to Irish History. It was played in clubs in all 32 counties and by Catholics and Protestants alike.
Professional sides regularly toured Ireland: in 1855, Ireland thrashed the Gentlemen of England by 107 runs at Phoenix Park. Tour
s by Ireland were also common: Ireland beat MCC by an innings at Lord’s in 1858, and also won there in 1862 and 1868.
In 1865, the first Handbook of Cricket in Ireland – an Irish Wisden – was released. It reveals a sport played not just by the military and in Anglophile educational institutions like Trinity College, Dublin, but also in workplaces.
‘There was a democratisation from the 1860s and 1870s which saw the game spread beyond the elite to the wider populace with the exception of the extremely poor,’ Dr Paul Rouse, a specialist in the history of sport in Ireland, explained. ‘In terms of field sports being participated in, if you exclude athletics, then by the 1870s cricket is without question the most popular field sport in Ireland.’
There were over 300 cricket clubs in Ireland and many more unofficial teams. Nevertheless, there were limits to cricket’s reach beyond Anglicised communities. In the final edition of the Handbook of Cricket in Ireland, published in 1882, the editor John Lawrence lamented, ‘Here in Ireland, cricket is unfortunately not the pastime of the masses, as it is in England.’
Analysis of the annuals by the academic Jon Gemmell found that ‘club cricketers were overwhelmingly drawn from the middle classes’, noting ‘the prominence of public schools, banks and hospitals in Lawrence’s annuals’.
Cricket was not equipped to survive the turbulence of late 19th-century Ireland. ‘Cricket did not fit an emerging nationalist consciousness,’ Gemmell wrote. In Tipperary, cricket was ‘tainted by association with the garrisons and affiliation to the big houses.’ In 1873, a newspaper in County Limerick lamented the popularity of ‘the English game of cricket’ at the expense of hurling. Yet such resentment of the ‘Englishness’ of cricket should not be overstated. Coverage of cricket in The Irish Sportsman and The Irish Times indicates a game that had wide acceptance in every corner of Ireland.
There was nothing inevitable about cricket’s decline from the start of the 1880s. Land wars between small farmers and mainly absentee landlords were disastrous for the sport, which was often played on these grounds. Emigration from the countryside, where cricket had thrived, to cities, where there was less space, was also problematic.