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Afghanistan and its people have not had much to cheer about in the past 30 years but one bright spot has come from a surprising source — its national cricket team.

Mainly trained in neighboring Pakistan, they came within one place of reaching the 2011 World Cup finals and now they enter the fray next week in Dubai, attempting to qualify for April’s Twenty20 finals in the West Indies.

Their Pakistani coach Kabir Khan told The Times of London that he and his teammates were determined to prove that far from the close shave in the World Cup qualifiers being a one-off, that they were a rising force in the one day game.

“People back home expect a lot more,” said 35-year-old Kabir, who guided his side to victories over more highly-ranked teams such as Ireland, Bermuda and Scotland. “We have to prove it was no fluke.”

The squad is made up of some Afghanistan-born players, though others were born in refugee camps across the border in Pakistan and one, 25-year-old batsman Raees Ahmadzai, revealed he got to know about the game only when Imran Khan-led Pakistan beat England in the 1992 World Cup final in Australia.

However, he preferred an England player as his role model.

“I wanted to be [former Test batsman] Alec Stewart. I couldn’t pronounce the other names.”

Kabir is cautiously optimistic that Afghanistan can be one of the two teams to progress to the tournament’s finals.

Afghanistan has been drawn in Group A along with Ireland, Scotland and, perhaps ironically in a political sense, the United States.

The ousted Taliban government permitted cricket from 2000 because, according to Kabir, “it was the only sport that they accepted, because it had intervals for prayer breaks.”

On the team’s prospects, Kabir says: “We’re not looking too far ahead, but we have a good chance of qualifying.”

“We need more facilities if we are to progress. We have only one turf pitch, in Kabul.”

The government is increasingly paying attention to the team’s exploits on the international stage, but there is still some way to go to explain to President Hamid Karzai the finer points of the sport, Kabir said.

“When I last saw him [Karzai], he asked me to explain the BMW rule,” Kabir said.

“I said that the first thing he needed to know was that it was called LBW.” 



Agence-France Press