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.
New Zealand’s captain Tim Southee (L) and his Afghanistan’s counterpart Hashmatullah Shahidi unveil the trophy on the eve of their one-off Test cricket match.Credit: AFP
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.
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.
‘We may come and kill you if you try to play cricket again’
The International Cricket Council appears oblivious to any suggestion it is indulging a government practising the most violent, misogynistic interpretation of Sharia. 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?