The national flag under which they play officially no longer exists. The anthem they stand for at the start of every game belongs to a republic that was overthrown two years ago.
Yet Afghanistan’s athletes have become the unlikely – and widely celebrated – heroes of the Cricket World Cup underway in India. In a tournament watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world, they handily defeated the defending world champions and two former defending champions. Some of the team’s stars are so popular that entire stadium sections shout their names. When they win, the players sing and dance from the dugout, to the team bus, to their hotel rooms.
The achievements of the Afghan cricket team further cement what has already been an astonishingly rapid rise in sporting history. They also speak to the potential of a nation marked by frequent violent fractures, if it had anything like what this team has. managed: continuity.
To play in this World Cup, the team has relied on delicate compromises, something that Afghanistan’s political leaders and the many international stakeholders who failed to avoid the country’s descent into a pariah state evaded. The bizarre circumstances are drowned out by the team’s success.
“People pray for us at home, they sit for our matches, for us to win, because cricket is the only happiness in Afghanistan,” 25-year-old Rashid Khan, one of the team’s biggest stars, told his teammates in a pregame conversation. ahead of a win last week.
He emphasized that the foundation must be good. But he underlined what was most important: “The most important thing: keep smiling.”
In a country stuck in a spiral of gloom, even small celebrations feel like acts of defiance.
Since the Taliban took power two years ago, Afghanistan’s aid-dependent economy has collapsed, leaving nine in 10 people living in poverty. Nature has added to the misery with earthquakes that have wiped out entire villages and killed hundreds of people.
The Taliban regime – which confines women to their homes and denies them the right to work or receive education beyond the sixth grade – is a government that is not internationally recognized. The white flag does not appear in international sports competitions. Afghan teams play under the flag of the republic that fell in 2021.
The national anthem played before every match is also a relic. The Taliban do not have their own national anthem because they consider public music forbidden by Islam.
But the Taliban applaud the cricket team’s success, and officials say they have helped the team achieve its current success. Fans in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, and other cities take to the streets to celebrate after each victory, and the rulers release festive messages even as they ignore the black, red and green that the players and fans wear in the stadiums waving, and the renditions of the national anthem.
In this environment the players walk a tightrope. Mr Khan and another star of the team, Mohammed Nabi, have set up foundations to provide aid to the needy and rushed to help after the recent earthquakes.
Both have issued statements calling for the restoration of girls’ education.
“We stand in solidarity with our sisters and daughters of Afghanistan and demand that the decision on the ban on high school for girls and the ban on university for women be reversed,” Mr Khan said in a statement last year. “Every day of wasted education is a day wasted on the future of the country.”
Cricket has only come to prominence in Afghanistan in recent decades. Some of the country’s first players learned the game in refugee camps in Pakistan after fleeing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The earliest seeds of the game in the country date back to the last time the Taliban were in power, in the 1990s.
A more formal setup was created in the early 2000s, and the team’s rise was nothing short of a fairytale. In about a decade, Afghanistan rose through the ranks and began qualifying for several world championships, including three World Cups.
“We learned cricket as refugees,” said Raees Ahmadzai, a former player who is an assistant coach of the World Cup team. “The new generation is our product. We trained them in Afghanistan.”
Winning the current competition, which takes place in the daytime version of cricket, remains a gamble for Afghanistan. But the journey of Mr Khan, the team’s star, illustrates how far Afghan cricket has come.
Ten years ago, Mr Ahmadzai said he and his teammates were paid a monthly salary of $3 and a daily allowance of $25 when they traveled.
Mr Khan raked in $600,000 when he first started playing in the Indian Premier League, cricket’s most lucrative competition, in 2017, when he was 18. Last year he was picked up by a new franchise for almost $2 million.
He is one of the most sought-after cricketers in the world, playing in leagues in Asia, Australia, the Caribbean and the United States as a bowler and batsman. He has more than 13 million followers on social media. When he’s on the field, just a look at the crowd draws cheers and shouts. When the Afghan team bus is on its way in India, motorcyclists compete to stop at its window for a wave or even a dangerous selfie.
During training, when the team breaks for evening prayers, the team stands behind Mr Khan on a plastic mat rolled out in a corner of the stadium. If the team wins, he is the first to start dancing, leading the party’s boombox in hand.
Mr Khan’s groundbreaking celebrity has inspired a generation of younger players, some of whom are already playing alongside him.
As the team travels across India for the tournament, a small group of supporters follow the team, waving the old flag from the stands and dancing to DJ music banned at home. India has barred Afghans from entering the country since the Taliban took power, with only rare exceptions. The people in the stands are old refugees, but also many who went to India as students and are now stranded there.
After every match the team has won – first against England, the defending champions, then against Pakistan and Sri Lanka – the players have taken a victory lap around the stadium, thanking the Afghan fans and the thousands of Indian fans cheering for them.
When the team defeated Pakistan two weeks ago, the celebration was particularly long and loud. There was also a political undertone: Tens of thousands of Afghan refugees have been expelled in recent weeks by Pakistan, whose army has long been seen as contributing to instability in Afghanistan.
To get to that match, one fan, Akhtar Mohammed Azizi, had taken a ten-hour bus ride.
“It was such an amazing moment that I forgot everything else – all I could think about was positivity and happiness,” said Mr Azizi, who has been stranded in India since completing his business degree. “I forgot about the lack of sleep, the hunger. We celebrated, we danced, we took selfies with the players.”
During a break from the festivities, Mr. Ahmadzai, the coach, and Mr. Khan, the star player, recorded a video for their fans at home. They recited a Pashto poem that was the team’s rallying cry for years before dancing again – in the locker room, on the bus and late into the night at the team hotel.
“Pull up your sleeves, get in and dance/
The poor man’s happiness comes only every now and then.”