When Afghanistan lost a series to the UAE in Dubai at the end of 2014, while fine-tuning their preparation for a first World Cup, their coach knew exactly what to blame.
Andy Moles, the Englishman who was brought in after the previous incumbent quit with just months to go until the World Cup, reckoned they needed to work harder.
Less reliance on inspiration, more perspiration.
“For me, the big thing was to get the fitness levels up and make sure they can play good cricket consistently,” said Moles, the former county cricketer and New Zealand coach.
“The Afghan side can be good once or twice out of 10. I want us to be good five or six times out of 10. We can get that through better planning, better reviewing and getting players to take responsibility for the roles they have to fulfil in the team.”
The protagonists from the most colourful story, possibly in all of sport, now talk about read-outs from YoYo tests, of executing game plans and of knowing their roles within the group. How heroically trite.
They are done with talking about war, or about being refugees made good. And, to be fair, they have earned the right.
These players have kept international cricket in feel-good stories for the past decade.
Afghanistan: the sport’s unlikely shining light.
How did it come to this?
How did an Afghanistan cricket team come to be playing at the World Cup?
It is hard to know where to even start to answer that one.
Maybe some brief highlights from sport’s Cinderella side, just to cut a 15-year story short.
When Hamid Karzai’s government came to power in 2001, a group of young men who had learned cricket while displaced by war asked for support to set up a national cricket team.
The politicians resisted. “They said, ‘This is a Pakistani game, it won’t develop here, people should not waste their time’,” said Taj Malik, the first coach of the Afghan cricket team. But the side became an irresistible force, first winning matches, then the hearts of the nation, then the affections of the international sporting community.
“Every family was affected by the Russian war,” said Karim Sadiq, one of the multi-talented stalwarts of the original team, a pinch-hitting opening batsman, wicketkeeper and off-spinner.
“In every home, there was no happiness. Only cricket gave happiness to people.”
As a marker of the upward mobility now afforded to Afghan cricketers, Sadiq said that while on a three-month contract playing as a professional in UAE domestic cricket. The Emirates have been able to share in the journey, too.
As it has for Pakistan, the UAE has become a home away from home for Afghanistan, while security threats preclude sides from touring their homeland.
Twice landmark feats by the Afghans, who play their home matches in Sharjah, have come at the expense of their generous hosts.
In 2010, a semi-final win over the UAE earned a first trip to the World Twenty20 and prompted scenes of unbridled joy from Afghan spectators.
They invaded the field, danced on the grass at the Dubai International Stadium, and some waved framed pictures of Karzai.
The scene was much the same in Sharjah in 2013, when they clinched their place in this World Cup with a win over Kenya, again leapfrogging the UAE in the process.
“We dreamed this day would happen, that we would be heroes, but now it is real,” Samiullah Shenwari, one of the surviving members of the original side, said that day.
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“When we ran to celebrate in front of the crowd, I can’t tell you if we were running or not. We were flying.”
The history of Afghan cricket depends on the teller. If success is supposed to have a thousand fathers, the ascent of Afghanistan has too many to count.
Squabbling about who is to thank for what, and who is to blame, has been common.
In January, for example, there was an overhaul of the country’s board, with a new chairman and chief executive brought in.
Consider that. Two months before a World Cup.
Such is the way of Afghan cricket. Their rise over the past 15 years has been inexorable, despite a system that is in a permanent state of tempest.
It is testament to a set of players who are blessed with talent and, probably more importantly, strong minds.
“It doesn’t affect this team,” Moles said of the constant administrative flux.
Despite the perpetual off-field changes, the selection of the team has remained consistent.
Six of the players who were in the side when they beat Jersey to win Division 5 of the World Cricket League in 2008, and thus begin their charge up the rankings, are in the World Cup squad.
Many of cricket’s leading nations would be jealous of consistency like that.
And, because cricket has taken such a firm hold in Afghanistan, the next generation is swelling with promise, too.
“There is lots of natural talent and there is a good group below this, young players who are going to push these players for places after the World Cup,” Moles said.
pradley@thenational.ae
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