Cricket’s horror in indulging Afghanistan under Taliban rule must be stopped!
Only by suspending Afghanistan’s men’s team can the ICC repudiate the Taliban’s abhorrent treatment of women.
Oliver BrownChief Sports Writer
17 September 2024 7:04am
It was the “unveiling” video that triggered the nausea. Hashmatullah Shahidi and Tim Southee, the Test captains of Afghanistan and New Zealand, stood either side of a trophy contested last week by their two nations in a one-off match in India, theatrically revealing the ornate bauble by drawing back a long, black veil. Nobody, it seemed, had paused to consider the symbolism. For just a fortnight before this frivolous photo op, the Taliban had strengthened its “vice and virtue” laws to compel all Afghan women to veil their entire bodies, including their faces, simply to step outside.
The visual of the trophy presentation was not merely provocative, but obscene. In the end, the match never took place, with days of rain in Greater Noida ensuring a washout without a ball being bowled. But the far graver issue, which cricket has barely begun to confront, is why it was ever contemplated at all.
This is the sport that tried, however imperfectly, to isolate apartheid South Africa by suspending its team from international cricket for 21 years. Today, another barbarous segregation is being perpetrated by a Test nation, with Afghanistan’s fanatical rulers attempting to erase women from public life, issuing mandates that they must not sing, or laugh, or raise their voices, or even read aloud. And yet this time, the broader context is airbrushed, to the extent that the Afghanistan Cricket Board can perform its crass unveiling stunt without a word of censure within the game.
It is hardly as if cricket lacked fair warning. Straight after recapturing power in 2021, the Taliban outlawed Afghanistan’s nascent women’s team, with a spokesman for the regime’s cultural commission deeming the side neither appropriate nor necessary.
Cricket is giving the fundamentalists legitimacy
One member said she had received a message, just as Kabul was taken, telling her: “We may come and kill you if you try to play cricket again.” Three years on, the sport is still content to give these fundamentalists legitimacy, rewarding Afghanistan with regular projection on the global stage. This week, South Africa will line up as their latest opponents, travelling to the UAE for a first ever bilateral one-day series between the countries.
The International Cricket Council appears oblivious to any suggestion it is indulging a government practising the most violent, misogynistic interpretation of Sharia law. The explanation, on the surface, is that it has not officially recognised the Taliban as the ruling authority. For example, the men’s team still compete under the old black, red and green flag, rather than the Taliban-approved white version, with “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” written in black Pashto script. But you cannot keep artificially freezing time to justify your own inertia. Sooner or later, the ICC will have to appreciate that Taliban oppression is real, and that it is subjecting 20 million Afghan women to more unbearable indignities every day.
The nuclear option of sidelining Afghanistan is one it dare not countenance yet. It still regards the recent story of cricket in the country as a phoenix-like phenomenon, especially with Rashid Khan saying of the men’s advance to a T20 World Cup semi-final in June: “Cricket is the only source of happiness back home.” Dare the ICC douse the fervour? Dare it strip away the one unqualified success to have emerged under the Taliban’s medieval autocracy?
Frankly, the moment for platitudes has passed. The ICC has been at pains to empower women through cricket, partnering with Unicef in 2019 to raise £115,000 for a girls’ cricket project in Afghanistan. But organisations on this scale have an obligation to react to changing circumstances. And in five years the outlook for the nation’s women has gone from precarious to a level of bleakness no sport with a conscience can ignore. Just listen to the recording of one woman singing in defiance of the Taliban’s prohibition of that joyful act. “You’ve sealed my lips,” she says. “You’ve imprisoned me for the crime of being a woman.”
Are the administrators actively trolling the oppressed women?
In cricket’s parallel universe, her suffering does not exist. The projection of Afghanistan’s meeting with New Zealand followed the usual niceties: comments about the hosts’ cordial welcome, press conferences about how disappointed the teams were to lose a Test to the weather. And amid it all came the ultimate insult of that unveiling. Sometimes, you wonder whether cricket administrators — the vast majority of them male — are not merely neglecting their female audience, but actively trolling them.
There are those who have drawn a line. In May this year, Richard Gould, chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, declared that England would not schedule a bilateral series against Afghanistan while the Taliban refused to field a women’s team. Australia, where 22 of the 25 contracted Afghan female cricketers have relocated, went much earlier, confirming in 2021 that a once-mooted Test was being postponed indefinitely.
In one sense, it is an honourable position. In another, it is a cute PR trick, given that these match-ups were highly unlikely to have happened in any case. Plus, you do not need to look far for exceptions to the rule, with both England and Australia happy to participate in World Cup contests with Afghanistan when they required the win.
The far more fraught decision is whether to kick Afghanistan out altogether. Viewed narrowly, this should not be a difficult call: they are in flagrant breach of the ICC’s rule that all Test nations must assemble a female side. Never mind allowing girls to pick up a bat, the Taliban do not even permit them to go to school.
Only a year ago, the world governing body suspended Sri Lanka for two months, citing government interference in how the game was being run there. The crisis it surveys in Afghanistan is of a far greater magnitude. And with unspeakable cruelties being inflicted on the very women it purports to champion, standing idly by is no longer a viable choice. The horrors can only be corrected, in sporting terms, by suspending the men. For only then will the Taliban be denied at least some of the cachet it craves.
