Four years ago, Andy Moles, Afghanistan’s cricket coach made a prediction. “I am confident of Test status by 2030,” he said.
When they make their Test debut in Bangalore on Thursday, Afghanistan would have taken one of the shortest routes to the highest level in the history of the game. It is a testimony to what can be achieved when passion meets persistence.
India’s support
It is also a tribute to India’s support for the cause. Afghanistan’s “home ground” is Noida, they played “home” internationals in Dehradun recently. India has made a million-dollar contribution to the Kandahar International Stadium. This is the fourth team India will be initiating into Test cricket, Pakistan (1952), Zimbabwe (1992) and Bangladesh (2000) being the others.
Fairy tales are the lifeblood of sport. Yet, even in a society that casually accepts talking animals and web-slinging do-gooders and grown men flying around in capes or carrying hammers that can destroy his enemies, the story of Afghanistan’s cricket must seem like imagination gone wild.
A quarter century ago, there were no cricket grounds or players or an organisation — just a few refugees playing a rudimentary game with wooden sticks and a “ball” made by rolling plastic together and tying it all up.
Yet it was one of them, Taj Malik, who inspired Afghans to play seriously, and fantasised about taking a team to the World Cup. The dream was so outrageous, so implausible that it had to come true. It did, in 2015.
Nabi’s remarkable story
Mohammad Nabi, at 33, the oldest player in the Test team, has said he spent the first 17 years of his life in a refugee camp. At the Kacha Garhi camp in Peshawar, Taj and his two brothers put together a team that played in the league.
The documentary that introduced Afghanistan’s cricket to the world is called, aptly, Out of the Ashes . On the one hand, death and destruction; on the other, cover drives and a leg break like no other.
A player, Rahmat Wali, was shot dead by American forces. Raeez Ahmedzai, all-rounder, was lucky to escape with his life in a bombing.
Nabi’s father was kidnapped for ransom when the son was helping Afghanistan qualify for the World Cup. The same Nabi who hit the first ball in both innings on his first class debut for six. His is the quintessential Afghanistan story: success amidst disasters, personal and national. Cruelty and beauty co-exist in the country and in the minds of its players.
India made their Test debut 15 years before Independence, but the times were not violent. Afghanistan is the first country which wasn’t in the Commonwealth to play at the highest level. For this they have to thank the accident of geography which placed refugee camps in nearby Pakistan. Taj Malik — now out of cricket and into religion — watched the 1987 England tour of Pakistan. That inspired him.
War and terrorism have been Afghanistan’s constant companions. As Nadeem Aslam puts it in his superb Wasted Vigil : “Even the air of this country has a story to tell about warfare. It is possible here to lift a piece of bread from a plate and following it back to its origins, collect a dozen stories concerning war —how it affected the hand that pulled it out of the oven, the hand that kneaded the dough, how war impinged upon the field where wheat was grown.”
Two days before the Test match, a suicide bomber killed 13 outside a ministry office in Kabul. Less than a month ago, eight people were killed in bomb blasts at a cricket match in Jalalabad, the city already known as the home of Afghanistan cricket, now pinned to the map more firmly by leg spinner Rashid Khan who hails from there.
Unifying power of the game
In the years of apartheid in South Africa, the cry was, “No normal sport in an abnormal society”. It made sense. Afghanistan needs normal sport in its abnormal society. Cricket is an oasis of normality and is therefore played with unsurpassed fervour and zeal.
The healing and unifying power of cricket has never been more evident than in Afghanistan’s climb to the top. The game has the backing of the Taliban. “Nothing has ever brought us together like this,” said a finance minister some years ago. When Afghanistan win a match, Pashtuns, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks all take to the streets to celebrate, differences forgotten, or at least temporarily set aside.
Afghanistan is not likely to play a Test at home in the near future, owing to security concerns. Yet wherever they go, they will be seen as special; a reminder that sport too has the charms to soothe the savage breast. The players are a living, jumping, spinning, driving, six-hitting testimony to cricket’s ability to bring peoples together.
Whatever happens this week, Afghanistan cricket has already won — in the score-book that doesn’t restrict itself to runs and wickets, but goes beyond to take in resilience and spirit and everything that makes us human.
