The incredible journey of Mumtaz Habib, an Afghan refugee whose life was changed by cricket

NICK FRIEND: After moving to England as a teenage refugee, Habib won a scholarship to Harrow School, survived the Boxing Day tsunami and became the second-ever Afghan to play first-class cricket. Now, he is an MCC Foundation young ambassador

Mumtaz Habib came to England from Afghanistan in 2000 as a teenage refugee, seeking asylum. Until then, he had grown up with his family in Quetta, Pakistan. His sister was already living in Harrow, so Habib joined her, and she became his guardian.

Two decades later, so much has happened that makes him an inspirational, remarkable figure. He won a scholarship to Harrow School, survived the Sri Lankan tsunami, was the second-ever Afghan to play first-class cricket and became a British diplomat.

Now, he is a new father and due to marry in September, but at the epicentre of those experiences has been cricket, beginning with the generosity and compassion of his teammates at the local club that gave him a sense of self-worth in a foreign land.

And so, Habib has a message to share. If the story of his incredible life has taught him anything, it is that cricket can be so much more than a game.

“When I arrived in the UK at the age of 14, I didn’t speak a word of English,” he tells The Cricketer. “But it was a way of communicating, engaging and building the confidence to be able to settle in a new country with a new culture and a new language.

“For me, the important thing is what cricket can do for an individual, a team or a nation. It has provided me with opportunities and developed me as a person. I want to encourage people not to see cricket as a sport, but to use it as a platform.”

The example of his journey has the power to create a substantial difference in a sport increasingly aware of the changes it must belatedly implement to welcome an underrepresented demographic.

He is speaking as a newly announced young ambassador for the MCC Foundation, whose director – Sarah Fane – previously headed Afghan Connection, a charity that worked to bring cricket to the nation’s young people and improve girls’ education.

For Habib, this is only a part-time role – by day, he works for the Foreign Office – but the chance to affect change resonates with everything he has known since childhood.

^{These days, Habib is a British diplomat and now a young ambassador for the MCC Foundation}

He began attending Rooks Heath High School in the January after his December arrival at Heathrow’s terminal four, and he was indebted to a couple of fellow Afghans who looked after him and spoke in Pashto, taking him from class to class.

As fortune would have it, Harrow Town Cricket Club was a stone’s throw from his sister’s council flat, and Habib became a regular attendee. From there, he came to make use of Harrow School’s indoor nets through the winter, paying £10 per session on a Friday evening – money he would earn through selling olives at a local weekend market.

And then, fate. “I’m a great believer in God,” he says. “God exists. It doesn’t matter which God, but he exists. If you ask for something – not selfishly like asking for loads of money, but if you truly want something – he will make it happen. You just have to work hard.”

As he was driven by a Harrow Town teammate towards an away game in Wembley, the car passed a teenager in a white blazer. Students at the boarding school would receive the special jacket as a memento for representing Harrow at Lord’s against Eton. “I didn’t know about the school or the background story,” he recalls. “I had been in the UK for a year, so I didn’t know about the class system or anything like that. But I saw this chap and, very naively, I said: ‘I wish I could play here one day.’ A year later, I was playing there.”

"I see myself in loads of innocent kids who want to play cricket but can't afford it"

Six of the boys with whom he would practise each Friday had been offered trials for cricket scholarships to the school by Simon Halliday, a former wicketkeeper for Suffolk and the school’s head of cricket. Habib, a raw fast bowler with a rocket throw, turned up as the teenagers sought to impress.

“Because I had a really good arm, throwing it in from the boundary straight to the keeper wasn’t an issue for me,” he explains. “So, the ball was hit to me and I threw it straight in. Simon Halliday wanted to know whether it was a fluke, so he hit another ball out to me. I repeated the throw and he asked me who I was.”

The rest was history. He was handed a scholarship – on the condition of his GCSE grades – and, just four years after coming to the country with no grasp of English, he had a place at a world-famous institution – all through cricket, his means of connecting with a new home that was otherwise alien.

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It made sense for Harrow, too, with the good news story of an Afghan asylum-seeker making headlines in The Times and on the BBC website. In the same side as now-Hampshire batsman Sam Northeast, he featured twice at Lord’s against Eton – the realisation of a pipedream 12 months earlier. He was steered along by coach Ramesh Sethi, who turned out for East Africa in the inaugural 1975 World Cup.

From there, Habib graduated to Durham University, developing his game under the guidance of Graeme Fowler. In 2006, he would become only the second-ever Afghan to play a first-class game by facing Nottinghamshire for Durham UCCE, following Salim Durani, Kabul-born but an allrounder for India in 29 Tests between 1960 and 1973.

In truth, his playing career peaked there. He held ambitions for it to progress further – there was an offer on the table to spend a season in Australia – but, as so often in Habib’s story, life took over.

He says: “My mum was in Afghanistan and things weren’t improving, so I had to get a full-time job to show the UK government I was earning £25,000 to be able to sponsor her to come to the UK.

“When I graduated, I could either pursue my cricketing career or fulfil my duty towards my family and my mum. I took the latter. I got a job with the Foreign Office and sponsored my mum to come back and join us in the UK. In that sense, I don’t have any regrets – that was an easy decision to make.”

And so, club cricket has been his pinnacle ever since. He has played in the upper rungs of the Middlesex County Cricket League for a decade, first for Richmond and more recently for Barnes, whose first team he represents.

But he owes much to Harrow Town, whose goodwill towards a talented youngster paved the way for everything that has followed. More poignantly, his first club taught him a cross-culture kindness that he might otherwise not have found as a young refugee, who struggled to fit in during wintertime when there was little for him to do. But come April, a Pakistani friend took him down to the ground that would have “a massive impact on my upbringing”.

^{The MCC Foundation in action}

All this matters because of how he sees his ambassadorial role and the effect he wants to have. Habib recalls Mehdi Karachiwalla, a former player for Kenya who took him under his wing, speaking in Urdu to help him in his early days at the club. When he witnessed Habib batting in his first under-14 game with a soft-ball bat purchased from an Argos catalogue, Karachiwalla handed him his bat to keep.

And then there is Paul Manley, then-captain of the first team at Harrow Town. When he saw Habib running in to bowl without proper cricket shoes, he turned up at his flat a few days later with a £60 pair of high-ankle bowling boots.

That the last 20 years have been bookended with such contrasting events is extraordinary, but it means that Habib has seen both sides of life’s coin.

“Membership of a cricket club is not cheap,” he knows. “When I first joined Harrow Town, I didn’t have the money, but people would pay my membership and match fees. When I was trialling for Middlesex, after school I would take my cricket bag with me on four buses, train there and get four buses back after 9pm. Some of my friends had parents who would drive them. I had to think about how much it was going to cost me in terms of bus fare: I didn’t work – we were asylum seekers, and we were getting paid in vouchers.

"We need to encourage kids, we need to make them aware, we need to educate them that they shouldn't be peer-pressured into doing something because they want to be part of a team"

“So, I made the decision that I had to work during winter so I could save enough money to play during summer. Those people around me helped me a lot – they would pay £10 here and there, they’d pay my membership fee; and that was all so I could come and play cricket.”

Looking back now, it is the generosity of others that stands out and, as such, where he hopes to make use of his experiences through the MCC Foundation. Quite simply, now that he has a voice within cricket’s most famous club, he wants more to be done to help those in the position of his youth.

“I don’t think I could have done it without them,” he says, well aware of the importance of the financial support he received and the sheer number of similarly placed children now, who might love cricket if only they were able to find out.

He thinks back to all those he encountered along the way: Halliday, Sethi, Fowler, Manley, Karachiwalla and so many others. When Habib’s father passed away in Afghanistan in 2006, having not seen him since leaving for England six years earlier, Fowler was on hand as his university coach. “I was waiting until I graduated so I could go back and see him to say: ‘By the way, dad, you sent me to the UK and I got a degree,’” he says.

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“Foxy put his arm around me. I took a year out of my university life, but he would ring me and tell me that if I needed help or wanted to talk then he was there as a fatherly figure.

“And this is what the MCC should be about: helping people who struggle. When I was at Harrow, there were three of us going for Middlesex trials. We had a school minivan drive us there and pick us up. So, I’ve seen both sides of that: taking four buses and getting in a minibus. I want to be able to give those opportunities to people like myself, people who can’t afford to do to these things.

“They see MCC members walking in their jackets, blazers and ties. It’s intimidating. For me to be able to bring the human side of the MCC Foundation and support people like myself who are passionate about cricket – either by paying for their travel or encouraging coaching sessions – that’s what I’m about. I see myself in loads of innocent kids who want to play cricket but can’t afford it.”

And there is more to it than finances alone. Habib can recall one incident of racism from his time at Durham “where somebody called me a ‘P***’ under his breath. We were in the gym and he was a teammate. I just grabbed him and said: ‘One, I’m not from Pakistan; two, don’t say that word again. I do not care who you are.’ And he apologised”.

“My confidence in stuff like that has improved since I was 14 or 15: being able to speak the language, hold my ground and give it back. I’m mindful that if someone says something to another player, I’m very conscious of making sure that I step in and say this isn’t acceptable.”

The game’s lack of diversity is no secret in England. Ebony Rainford-Brent is the driving force behind the ACE Programme, set up to tackle the 75 per cent decline in participation levels among the African-Caribbean community. In 2018, the South Asian Action Plan was launched by the ECB to tackle dwindling numbers among the South Asian population, while at the start of this year the national governing body also introduced bursaries to enable underrepresented demographic groups to gain coaching qualifications.

Those schemes all represent important moves beyond the lip service that Habib feels has let down communities like his in the past.

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Within the United Kingdom, the MCC Foundation runs more than 60 cricket hubs which aim to improve representation in the game by removing social, cultural and financial barriers to accessing talent pathways. A virtual product is set to be launched in the coming weeks to provide fitness and wellbeing resources. One specific hub to be established this year in Croydon will work with the Refugee Cricket Project to provide coaching and mentorship to Afghan children.

There is another heartening story of a young Afghan boy who had arrived alone in the UK. He struggled with the language and was desperately unhappy until, while walking past Lord’s with his foster mother one day, he stopped, stared and was invited to look round the ground by one of the gatemen, who mentioned the work of the MCC. He now has a place reserved at the organisation’s Tottenham hub when it opens this year.

Overall, the schemes provide free coaching and match-play to almost 3,000 state-educated young cricketers, with particular focus on children from disadvantaged backgrounds and black, Asian and minority ethnic communities.

“Diversity is a huge part,” says Habib. “When I see an Afghan in club cricket, I try to speak to them – I tell them that I’m Afghan. When you’re playing with nine white guys, they just assume that you’re one of the white guys, so I try to encourage them to speak in their language by saying: ‘Oh, by the way, I’m Afghan and I play cricket. How can I help?’

"For me, it's about giving back to communities: these inner-city kids, Afghans, refugees, asylum seekers, people who don't have access, people who don't feel like they're part of the community"

“Certain clubs attract certain characters and people. I don’t think it’s a bad reflection on those clubs. There’s nothing wrong with it – I’m not saying that. But it is intimidating when somebody walks into a club and everybody knows each other. It feels exclusive rather than inclusive. We need to branch out – maybe that means offering free sessions for these kids. That is one of the things that is bugging me a lot.”

The perception of certain aspects of the game – English cricket’s alcohol culture, for one – is another connected issue that Habib believes must be more sensitively considered and better handled.

He didn’t drink until he began studying at Durham, though he insists this was a personal choice.

“It wasn’t out of peer pressure or anything like that,” he says, “but it is a massive part at university. If you don’t drink, especially if you’re from an ethnic minority background, most of the team bonding sessions take place at the pub or on a social. So, you already feel left out.

^{Habib became the second-ever Afghan to play first-class cricket}

“We need to encourage kids, we need to make them aware, we need to educate them that they shouldn’t be peer-pressured into doing something because they want to be part of a team. Because then, you just lose that excitement.”

Habib plays rugby as well, having been introduced to the sport at Harrow by Roger Uttley, the former England captain and Lions assistant coach. And so, he is well-versed in the emphasis placed on drinking in amateur sport and its propensity to put off potential participants. “I know what happens on some of those socials,” he adds.

It reminds him of a time at one of his former clubs when an Australian overseas player chose to avoid alcohol because he was committed to pursuing a professional cricket career; as a result, he found life difficult in a young first team, whose core was only recently out of university.

“If you weren’t drinking or it went against your religion and beliefs or you just didn’t want to drink, it can be a very scary place.”

Not much fazes Habib, however. Not when so much has happened in a single life: he was part of a school cricket tour to Galle when the Boxing Day tsunami ripped through Sri Lanka, and he puts his survival down to the knowledge of Halliday, also a geography teacher, who knew what he was seeing when water burst past the walls of the famous nearby fort. He ordered his team to run, and they took shelter on the second floor of the international ground’s pavilion. They had been awaiting the toss when disaster struck.

“We had to walk over dead people to get to safety,” he recalls. “Our driver was killed. We had about six senior players and some 14 and 15-year-olds. I couldn’t swim and they were crying because their parents were on their way to watch the game. My best friend’s stepdad was killed. We were stuck in the pavilion for four hours before the water started to relent and we were able to go into the high hills.

“We stayed on a hotel floor and we were taken to safety in the mountains and taken back to Colombo. As a captain, I don’t think I was worried about myself – it was more about trying to console the kids.

“I think just because of the fact that I had seen those types of things in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I was probably a bit immune to that. But it brought me very close to some of my teammates – my best friend Spencer Crawley, we became best friends because we could resonate around our personal stories.

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“I wasn’t worried about dying. At that age, you really don’t think about death – you just think about life, to be honest. But I didn’t know the scale of what had happened. Harrow called my sister to tell her that we had been hit but were okay.

“When I got hold of my dad three days later, he started swearing straight away without asking how I was. He was like: ‘I sent you from Afghanistan to be safe in the UK, and you go all the way to Sri Lanka!’ That was his take on it.”

And so, Habib can appreciate the fragility of human existence like few others.

In a sense, his ambassadorial role completes the circle of his life in England: 17 years after first stepping out at Lord’s as a wide-eyed Afghan teenager fulfilling his own prophecy, he is representing the MCC as the embodiment of all that its foundation seeks to accomplish.

“I will always revert back to the day I arrived,” he reflects.

“I remember it. From that day to now, I have always thought about what I have achieved, how it was achieved and how I can give back for some of what I’ve learnt on my personal journey, especially when things go wrong or aren’t going well. When things are okay, you’re in a cruise lane and you don’t think about these things.

“Perspective is very important. Not everything is going to go according to plan. With most of the big moments in my life – Harrow, Durham, bringing mum to the UK, work – you have to take a step back and appreciate them and respect what they mean.

“And for me, it’s about giving back to communities: these inner-city kids, Afghans, refugees, asylum seekers, people who don’t have access, people who don’t feel like they’re part of the community. Moeen Ali has spoken about it in his interviews. This resonates with me.

“I want to be able to tell that story to kids and encourage them: life is hard, but just remember that cricket isn’t just a game, but also a platform that can build your confidence and personality. It gives you that opportunity.”

For more information about the MCC Foundation, click here