KABUL, Afghanistan — If ever a team needed to win big for its fans’ sake, it was this one — at this moment.
On Monday, Afghanistan’s beloved national cricket squad prompted cheers back home by winning its first-ever match in the Test format, the sport’s highest level of competition.
The win, against Ireland at a Test match in northern India, is an increasingly rare commodity: a good news story in Afghanistan. Security forces there are fighting a desperate, bloody campaign against the Taliban, and many fear that if the United States reaches a deal with the insurgents, it could jeopardize human rights and the safety of ethnic minority groups.
“People are in love with cricket, and amid the news of suicide attacks, bombing of civilians and losses of security forces, it is the only thing that brings happiness,” said Nazim Jar Abdurrahimzai, the game development manager at the Afghanistan Cricket Board.
Afghan fans have been jubilant on social media since the victory. The cricket board has said that celebrations are planned, and that some fans plan to greet the members of the team when they arrive at the Kabul airport on Wednesday.
Praise for the team has also poured in from cricket fans, players and organizations around the world.
Even the former cricket star Imran Khan, now the prime minister of neighboring Pakistan, which has tense relations with Afghanistan, congratulated the country on its “amazing successes in such a short period of their exposure to international cricket.”
Afghanistan’s first cricket team was founded more than a decade ago by players returning home from a refugee camp in Pakistan. The sport later grew into a national obsession, a status it already enjoyed across much of South Asia.
Afghan cricket stars like Rashid Khan are now mega-celebrities whose faces are plastered across billboards. Television channels and radio stations avidly follow their matches, and the local fan base has rapidly grown.
“Afghanistan’s cricket team has surmounted obstacles unknown to most athletes — terrorism, displacement, war — and with flair and panache that have won admirers the world over,” the cricket journalist Sidharth Monga wrote last year in the Opinion section of The New York Times.
Cricket’s Test format, in which matches last up to five days, is the sport’s most exclusive club. In 2017, Afghanistan and Ireland became the first new Test countries since Bangladesh was promoted to Test status in 2000.
In Afghanistan’s inaugural Test match last year, the national team was routed by India in just two days. The team’s coach, Phil Simmons, said at the time that while his players had a “huge” learning curve to overcome, they also had an admirable work ethic.
“Now we know that we have to work five times as hard,” Mr. Simmons said.
The team’s Test victory on Monday came on the fourth day of a match at Rajiv Gandhi International Cricket Stadium, in the northern Indian city of Dehradun. Afghanistan is now only the third country — along with England and Pakistan — to win after just two appearances at the Test level. (Only Australia won faster, on its first try.)
President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan called the victory “a proud moment for the whole nation.”
Mohammad Nabi, one of the team’s stars, vowed that it would not be Afghanistan’s last. “If we can put up a good score on the board, then we are confident of beating any team in the world,” he said.
A major challenge will come this spring, when the team makes its second appearance at the ICC Cricket World Cup in England and Wales. Although Afghanistan is ranked 10th out of 10 teams at the tournament, its captain, Asghar Afghan, said recently that the goal was not merely to show up but to win.
Sharaf Naib, 23, a construction worker in Kabul, said by telephone on Tuesday that he had already built a Cricket World Cup trophy — out of snow — in anticipation.
“This is the only thing that gives us a break from the ongoing violence and sad incidents happening in the country,” he said of the cricket team’s success. “It’s our only social life.”
Source : Nytimes
