Cricket offers the Afghan people a chance to present their best face to the world

PAUL EDWARDS: By playing against Rashid Khan and his colleagues, Pat Cummins would be supporting those who have publicly opposed the Taliban's evil. Maybe it is a shame the Aussies have passed up the chance

The most impressive cricketer I met in 2022 has not yet played a first-class game and might never do so.

His name is Masihullah Qazkhill and he is an 18-year-old Afghan refugee. Masih flew to this country after the Taliban seized power in his homeland, the country whose shirt he aspires to wear on the cricket field. For the moment, however, he is living in Worcestershire.

When I met him at New Road last September Masih was just coming to the end of a year in which he had settled into a new home, learned a language and got used to college life. He had also spent the summer bowling slow left-arm for Astwood Bank in the Worcestershire County League, taking 51 wickets and helping his team finish third in the table.

Yet it is only a year or so since Masih turned up for his first winter net session at his new club. All the Astwood Bank players knew then was that one of Masih's teachers had asked whether this young lad from Afghanistan could take part in their pre-season practice. "His bowling was unbelievable," said Jason Adams, who was sitting with us in one of Worcestershire's hospitality suites. "And we soon noticed that he was also a gun fielder."

The good news didn't end there. Astwood Bank had already signed their overseas player for 2022 so County League officials had to issue a special dispensation allowing the club to field Masih as a second such cricketer, thereby allowing a lad who has experienced a lifetime's trauma to enjoy a successful first summer in England.

^{Australia have pulled out of an upcoming ODI series against Afghanistan [Sarah Reed/Getty Images]}

It's a lovely story isn't it? Something to warm the heart in an often cheerless month packed with miserable news. And you would think it all the finer if you had met Masih and watched him hold a cricket ball in his hand, moving his fingers around the seam to gain purchase. 

"For the slower ball I hold the ball like this and for a quicker ball I hold it like this," he says, "but, of course, it's not going to turn as much." It is almost an act of love.

Masih began playing cricket in the streets of Afghanistan when he was nine. Immediately that brings to mind black-and-white images from another England, for although it is still possible to find impromptu games over here, householders and drivers are no longer so tolerant and the lure of various screens has seduced children away from such innocent pursuits.    

Anyway, Masih was a fast bowler. Then he saw Rashid Khan bowling leg-spin for Afghanistan against Zimbabwe in 2018. That changed more or less everything. Rashid became a hero to him and cricket is now his first and only sport. He attended the open trials at New Road last season and this year, he will be playing for Halesowen in the Birmingham League. If he makes any money out of cricket he wants to send some of it back to Afghanistan.

I first told this tale on Worcestershire's website and I now welcome the chance to give it wider circulation. It came to mind again last week when Cricket Australia announced that they would not be playing a three-match ODI series against Afghanistan that had been scheduled to take place in the UAE March.

"This decision follows the recent announcement by the Taliban of further restrictions on women's and girls' education and employment opportunities and their ability to access parks and gyms," said the governing body's accompanying statement.  

"CA is committed to supporting growing the game for women and men around the world, including in Afghanistan, and will continue to engage with the Afghanistan Cricket Board in anticipation of improved conditions for women and girls in the country."

^{Afghanistan fans at the 2022 T20 World Cup [Bradley Kanaris/Getty Images]}

My first reaction to this news was to give three rousing cheers. One hardly needed a diploma in International Relations to see that the return to power of the Taliban's brutal misogynists would be appalling news for women in Afghanistan.

As I write, girls are not allowed to attend school or university in that country and women are not even allowed to work for the aid agencies whose help for the general population is desperately needed. To play cricket when such casual savagery is being visited on half the population of a country seems vaguely obscene, the sort of thing you do if you believe that politics should be kept out of sport. Isolation played a role in destroying apartheid in South Africa; perhaps something similar can be achieved here.

The problem is that the two situations cannot be compared so conveniently. Sport mattered very much to the Nationalist government in South Africa and the sporting boycott was supported by those black cricketers it was trying to help – and many white players, too, come to that.

There is no evidence that the Taliban gives a toss about Australia's withdrawal or that it cares very much about sport in general. Rather, it is more concerned with imposing fundamentalism on its people and crushing any sign of resistance. It doesn't care that Afghans are starving as long as they are dressed correctly when they eventually die.

At which point, we should probably let Masih's hero, Rashid Khan, have a say. To his enormous credit, he has not been reticent. As my colleague Ben Gardner pointed out in a fine piece on Wisden's website, he played in The Hundred with a black, red and green Afghanistan flag painted on his face rather to the Taliban's black Shahada on a white background.

One of his social media posts at the time read: "Don't leave us in chaos. Stop killing Afghans and destroying Afghanistan." (For the avoidance of doubt, he was addressing the Taliban rather than US and UK governments, whose withdrawal in the summer of 2021 had enabled the Taliban to seize power.)

When women lost their right to formal education, Rashid ended his posts with the hashtag #LetAfghanGirlsLearn. His team mates, Mohammad Nabi, Gulbadin Naib, Fazalhaq Farooqi and Mujeeb Ur Rahman endorsed his view.

^{Rashid Khan has spoken about Australia's decision not to play Afghanistan [Getty Images]}

It barely needs saying that Rashid's public pronouncements are extraordinarily brave. Perhaps he feels able to speak out because there is a fair argument that he is the most famous Afghan on Earth, someone who has done far more for his country than the fundamentalist sadists who misgovern it.

But Rashid also spoke out against Cricket Australia's decision, possibly because he understands that the game of cricket offers the Afghan people a chance to present their best face to the world. By playing against Rashid and his colleagues, Pat Cummins would be supporting those who have publicly opposed the Taliban's evil. Maybe it is a shame the Aussies have passed up the chance.

But I do not for a moment believe that such pragmatism would be easy; neither do I think Rashid and his team-mates would feel comfortable about representing their country at a time when half the population is not allowed to exercise the most basic human rights. (And no, I have not forgotten the role of various British governments in this, stretching back to the easy soundbite of the war on terror.) The idealistic option of isolation remains so very tempting.

For now, though, I take comfort from Masih's story and I'm grateful I live in a country whose people welcomed him and gave him a chance to follow his star.

Over the next weeks and months, we will hear a lot about racism in cricket and in our society. Without diminishing the importance of the work that still needs to be done, I hope we remember the things ordinary folk get right. Like helping an 18-year-old slow left-armer achieve his lovely dream of becoming the next Rashid Khan.