Afghan adventures

In May 2003, 14 teams gathered at the Chaman-i-Hozori maidan in downtown Kabul for the very first Afghan national cricket trials. Some players had come from far parts, from Khost, in the east, and Kandahar, in the south, as word spread by mouth among the country’s small community of cricket players that a tournament was being organised by the Afghan Cricket Federation, and that the best players would be picked for the new U17, U19, and senior national teams. The federation had been formed in 1995, and was being run by two men, Allah Dad and Taj Malik. Malik had recently returned to Afghanistan from the vast Kacha Garhi refugee camp outside Peshawar. He came back with the express intention of setting up an Afghan national team and leading them to the World Cup.

They had some kit, much of it donated by English counties, and the support of a few key diplomats at both the British Embassy and in the Afghan government. Now they needed players, which is why they decided to hold what became known, thanks to a last-minute sponsorship deal, as the First Olympia Lube Oil Cricket Tournament. A concrete strip had been laid at Chaman-i-Hozori, the only flat patch on the rutted, dusty and rubbish-strewn park. A wrecked helicopter lay just by one boundary, burnt-out and shot-up, a relic of the Soviet-Afghan war, and beyond that sat a broken-down twin-prop plane. The first match was between Malik’s Kabul academy side and the International Security Assistance Force. The Afghans scored 151 in their 40 overs, and won by 11 runs.

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The academy’s best player was a handsome man named Asghar Stanikzai, who made 65 and then took five wickets. So he became the very first man to be picked for the new national team. Back then they called Asghar “Dandy”, because he liked to dye his hair red with henna, and often wore a skullcap embroidered with jewels. His father had been a gem dealer, and his family had some money and a modern house in Peshawar. These days he is Afghanistan’s captain, and last Friday he scored 62 off 47 balls against Sri Lanka at Eden Gardens in the World Twenty20. He threw his bat so hard it looked like a man trying to trying to heave a bathtub over a tall brick wall. It was a brilliant innings.

In the long history of English cricket, which stretches back into the 16th century, 13 years is nothing at all, just another quick tick of the clock. For the Afghans who play them in Delhi on Wednesday, it is everything, and encompasses nearly their entire history. It’s not just Stanikzai. Karim Sadiq, Taj Malik’s brother, also played in the First Olympia Lube Oil Cricket Tournament. So did Samiullah Shenwari, one of the team’s two leg-spinners, Mohammad Nabi, their middle-order batsman and spinner, and Hamid Hassan, their fast bowler. In fact no one at the ACF had ever seen Hamid until he turned up for the trials, an overweight schoolboy who had never even held a hard cricket ball. He had skipped his final exams to come and play.

The 13-year timeline doesn’t square with some of the players’ ages. Hamid is listed as 28, which means he would have been 15 when he started. Karim is supposed to be 32, but seems to have been that age for at least six years now, ever since I first met him back in 2010. But then, when the team were invited to their first international tournament, the 2004 ACC Trophy in Malaysia, the players did not have birth certificates, let alone passports. And because many Afghan families didn’t celebrate birthdays, most of the players could only guess at their date of birth. Karim’s documents, for instance, claim he was born 48 days after his elder brother, Hasti. When they flew to Malaysia, it was the first time any of them had been on a plane. They still beat both Bahrain and Malaysia, which meant they finished fifth.

All the team had to work with back then was their talent. In his brilliant book Out of the Ashes – still the best account of the Afghan team’s journey, and the source for many of the details in this story – Tim Albone reports a conversation between Taj Malik and a Kabul shopkeeper. Taj had gone out to by himself a new suit before the team’s trip to Jersey to play in Division 5 of the International Cricket Council’s World Cricket League. The shopkeeper told him that he preferred football to cricket. “Taj finishes the argument by telling him the Afghan cricket team is only five years behind the international community whereas the football team is 50 years adrift.” And he was right. In two years the cricket team were playing in their first World T20. In seven, their first 50-over World Cup.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Afghan boys play cricket at Chaman-i-Hazoori in 2004. Photograph: Syed Jan Sabawoon/EPA

Those matches in 2003 seem so long ago. But time goes both fast and slow and in another sense, things have moved so very quickly, accelerated along by all the help the team have had, especially from the Asian Cricket Council and the MCC. Now they need more. Last week Stanikzai added his voice to the chorus calling for the associate nations to be given more matches against the top teams. Afghanistan have now played 22 limited-overs matches against Bangladesh and Zimbabwe, and won 14 of them, including five out of six T20s. But they’ve played only 16 against the other eight full members of the ICC, and only three of those took place outside of ICC tournaments. They are still waiting for their first win against one of those eight teams.

“If we play against other associate countries, we will get experience from each other, but if you play with a full member, like we did against Zimbabwe in ODIs and T20s, you learn how to beat them,” Stanikzai said. “We now have that experience. As long as we play more games against full members, the distance between associates and full members will reduce.” Which, of course, may well be the very situation some members of the ICC would like to avoid.

The Afghans made it from the Chaman-i-Hozori to the Feroz Shah Kotla in the last 13 years. As Stanikzai says, in that time they’ve done “what other nations couldn’t do in 30-40 years”. If given what they’re asking for, regular fixtures against the Test-playing nations, who would dare put a limit on how high they might climb in the next 13?

• This is an extract taken from the Spin, the Guardian’s weekly cricket email. To subscribe just visit this page, find ‘The Spin’ and follow the instructions.