You would struggle to find a bunch of a cricketers with a more perilous journey to the international arena than Afghanistan.
The current group of Afghanistan players picked up cricket in refugee camps in Pakistan as cricket mushroomed either side of the Durand line that divides Afghanistan and Pakistan during the prolonged period of turmoil and violence in the central Asian country.
Players like Mohammad Shahzad and Mohammad Nabi featured regularly in Pakistan’s domestic matches and local leagues in Peshawar. Conditions back home were far from ideal. In fact, when they returned to Kabul after the war ended, the team used a grounded helicopter for a makeshift dressing room as there was simply nothing else around.
“We used to sit inside that grounded helicopter because it used to rain all the time. Now, we have a stadium there (Kabul),” the Afghanistan team’s then media manager Bashir Stanikzai was quoted as saying by the DNA newspaper.
In 2009, Afghanistan gained ODI status and within a decade of their rise to the international stage, the Afghans were granted Test status.
What has set Afghanistan apart from other cricketing regions is the fact they are the only nation that actively picked up the sport without any intervention from the British.
Afghanistan’s first cricket body was formed in 1995 in the refugee camps in Peshawar. Cricket, in fact, is the only sport that was ‘approved’ by the previous regime in Afghanistan in the early 2000s. From there, the game flourished and we have now reached the stage where Afghanistan will not only take on world No1 India in one of the most historic venues in the world – M. Chinnaswamy Stadium – but will get to play against every team visiting India.
For a team that started its cricketing journey in a refugee camp two decades ago, Afghanistan have come a long, long way.
As Afghan fast bowler Hamid Hassan, quoted by ESPNcricinfo, said: “I have seen people die and not shed a tear. But there is something about cricket that gets me in my heart.”
