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The educated center class in Herat, the third-largest metropolis in Afghanistan, had a saying that gave it power by way of its resistance to the Taliban.
When Herat falls, Afghanistan will fall.
An academic and cultural hub within the area, the town had lengthy been recognized for its progressive pondering and inventive expression, apart from being a key financial centre. Over the course of historical past, the scent of saffron, that has lengthy been related to Herat, has typically given method to a putrid air, reeking of bloodshed and plunder. This time too, Herat fought, however finally fell to the Taliban on August 12.
Firooza knew she wanted to depart.
Almost 4 years have handed since. Australia is the brand new house to over 20 such cricketers and their households who had been evacuated from Afghanistan. Three ladies – former Australian captain Mel Jones, Emma Staples (at present a school member at Victoria College), and Dr. Catherine Ordway, a Sport Administration professor on the College of Canberra – gathered their assets and contacts to rearrange humanitarian visas for greater than 120 individuals.
From left to proper: Afghanistan Ladies’s XI Nahida Sapan, former Afghan ladies’s coach Diana Barakzai and former Australian cricketer Mel Jones previous to the coin toss earlier than the beginning of the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AP
From left to proper: Afghanistan Ladies’s XI Nahida Sapan, former Afghan ladies’s coach Diana Barakzai and former Australian cricketer Mel Jones previous to the coin toss earlier than the beginning of the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AP
Lots of the Afghan women now go to college, have part-time jobs and play membership cricket in Melbourne and Canberra. 4 of the ladies additionally routinely play Victoria Premier Cricket, the state’s elite membership match.
From barely talking English to fluently dealing with interviews with out help, endeavor academic change programmes to the US and dealing with Cricket Australia in voluntary capacities, life now appears starkly totally different from what it was like and threatened to turn out to be in Afghanistan.
Into the deep finish
For a woman raised to be impartial and free-thinking, life as a refuge the place one’s complete sense of self needed to be constructed from scratch, was onerous to say the very least. Firooza – who performs cricket for Dandenong Cricket Membership in Melbourne – tells Sportstar that the change was more durable on her mother and father, who had recognized nothing exterior Afghanistan and their lifestyle at house.
“It’s been tough on my parents. At the age of 40 and 50, it’s not easy to be a refugee in another country, away from everything you know and love. It’s a new world and it’s challenging but it’s a sacrifice they’ve made for the safety of their children.”
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However cricket was a typical language. Firooza’s first ache was for a cricket equipment and Jones, who was there to greet the households arriving in Melbourne, dealt with it.
After weeks, if not months, of direct threats to their lives, it was now time to rebuild this new one they’d been gifted.
Nevertheless, it didn’t take a lot for this household to be transported proper again house to Herat and begin from sq. one. Battle-torn because it was, Firooza says she will be able to nonetheless keep in mind each highway, each road nook.
“Drop me off at the airport and I can walk back home,” the smile she has when mentioning her hometown shortly vanishes. “But it’s a home I can never go back to. Not as long as the Taliban is there. Maybe not ever again.”
Recollections of homicide
“My parents lived through their first regime,” Firooza recollects.
“When I was born, there was no Taliban. We only studied about their regime in school. We knew how they had been, the restrictions in place. We always knew who they were. I never knew there would come a time when I would experience it myself. They are a terrorist group and everyone is scared of them.”
Earlier than her metropolis fell, she remembers being holed up in her residence for over a month, fearing for her security. Pursuing cricket had positioned an enormous goal on her again. Even earlier than the group’s full takeover of the nation, the Taliban routinely raided communities in search of ladies pursuing sports activities, having deemed it unlawful.
“My sister was a loopy cricket fan. She was at all times on the cricket floor. Herat too was a metropolis extra in love with soccer than cricket. So I went together with her at some point. I picked up a bat to play and see what all of the fuss was about and there was no turning again.
Afghan women play cricket on the college grounds in Herat on September 2, 2013.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
Afghan women play cricket on the college grounds in Herat on September 2, 2013.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
“From thereon, I either skipped lessons to play cricket or stayed back after school for a game.”
She discovered assist in her father who would say, “There’s nothing that my son can do that my daughters cannot do.”
Afghanistan’s ladies’s workforce was shaped in 2010 however the outfit solely performed one match earlier than conservatives put a cease to any exercise involving ladies and the phrase ‘sport’. In 2020, the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) carried out a camp and consequently handed out 25 central contracts – Firooza was one amongst them – with hopes of no less than conducting matches with different Islamic nations. Their ambitions had been quickly torn to bits by the talons of the Taliban.
A life that ought to have concerned bilateral video games, coaching and delight now turned about survival.
The ladies destroyed each hint of their existence, save the contracts which proved to be very important documentation in aiding their evacuation.
They left their hearts behind. Firooza needed to abandon her grandparents, her outdated house and the previous couple of items of a liberal childhood that gave her the audacity to dream.
“The Taliban was checking homes. If there was a girl there playing cricket, or if they discovered kit belonging to a girl, the family would be killed. I burnt everything that was close to my heart – my medals, my kit, everything I had achieved in my six years of playing, coaching and umpiring.
“The only thing I saved was my Afghanistan National Day uniform, which had my country’s name on the back. I wore it under the one dress I took. I came to Australia with one backpack.”
Overcoming trauma
In early 2022, Arvind Suresh – a sports activities administration graduate and former Cricket Victoria worker who initially hails from Chennai, India – was roped in to educate the Afghanistan women.
Arvind Suresh with the Afghanistan ladies cricketers.
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association
Arvind Suresh with the Afghanistan ladies cricketers.
| Photograph Credit score:
Particular Association
“Emma (Staples) was my colleague at Cricket Victoria and she reached out to me then asking if there was a club these girls could play in,” Suresh tells Sportstar.
“I was playing for Carnegie Cricket Club. It’s a very inclusive space so I suggested they have a training session here and if they like it, they can figure out joining the club or pursue other alternatives.”
The Afghan women had been enrolled within the Mid 12 months Cricket Affiliation, a winter match in Australia.
“These girls wanted to play as a group. It might not always be the case, especially when they enter the club ecosystem, where they will get split according to skill level. All they wanted though was to play as the Afghan team,” he provides.
That chance did come for them, 4 years later.
On January 30, hours earlier than the Ashes Pink Ball Take a look at on the Melbourne Cricket Floor, 13 out of the 19 contracted cricketers who had been evacuated from Afghanistan got here collectively to play towards an organisation referred to as Cricket With out Borders. The match was effectively attended by the who’s who of the Australian Authorities. Even England captain Heather Knight was noticed cheering on the Afghan women.
England ladies’s captain Heather Knight (second from left) watches the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
England ladies’s captain Heather Knight (second from left) watches the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
Clad in blue, this Afghan workforce didn’t have the legitimacy of their nation’s identification with out ICC recognition. Benafsha Hashimi, one of many gamers within the Afghan XI, designed the brand for his or her kits – a crimson tulip and a golden wattle round a cricket ball – bringing collectively the nationwide flowers of Australia and Afghanistan.
They misplaced the match that day, however that recreation, the possibility to be an Afghanistan workforce – even when not formally – was a giant win for a bunch that by no means thought they’d have the ability to contact a cricket bat and ball once more. Suresh co-coached this aspect, with life coming full circle for him too.
“One of my earliest memories of the girls is this visual of them walking from Carnegie Station to the cricket club which is roughly a 10-15 minute walk. The entire time, they walked as a pack, holding hands, tight together, walking slowly cautiously towards the club. They wouldn’t talk much then, raised their heads very little.
“In the first training session, we had a club photographer there to take a few photos so we could show our members what we were up to. Majority of the girls at the time refused to be photographed and understandably so.
Suresh remembers one particular training session at the Monash University campus that he says will stay with him for life.
“We were training them with the Uni team here during which something fell on the asbestos roof. Some of the girls just instantly went down on the ground. That absolutely blew my mind. They would tell us stories of how neighbours pelted stones at them if they caught them practising cricket, how they had to burn up their past before coming here. It was extremely eye-opening.”
Afghanistan Ladies’s XI gamers say a prayer earlier than the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
Afghanistan Ladies’s XI gamers say a prayer earlier than the charity match towards Cricket With out Borders XI at Junction Oval in Melbourne on January 30, 2025.
| Photograph Credit score:
AFP
Minimize to 2025. Suresh remembers how the workforce gathered collectively for a huddle earlier than the exhibition recreation and prayed in unison. He remembers the loud scream when the Afghan XI scored its first run. Lastly, they had been Afghan cricketers one way or the other, an identification their very own nation refused to offer them.
The struggling of silence
The lads’s aspect, which for years now has been displaying sparks of brilliance, notably on the massive stage, was a supply of inspiration for these ladies ripped away from their motherland.
“By the time I started watching cricket regularly, the Afghan men’s side was everywhere, competing in World Cups, Champions Trophies and the works. That’s all our dream was, to represent Afghanistan. To have that name on our back. The men got to do it and we wanted to too,” Firooza says.
Cricket Australia was the primary board to announce a boycott of bilateral video games with Afghanistan when it “indefinitely postponed” a Take a look at fixture towards the nation in 2021. Subsequent sequence had been additionally not performed citing deteriorating state of human rights for ladies in Afghanistan. This concerned merciless diktats like necessary overlaying of their our bodies together with their eyes in thick veils to ‘avoid leading men into temptation and vice’, ban on ladies’s voices in public – no singing or studying aloud even from inside their houses, and naturally, no participation in public life, workspaces or sport.
Australia solely performs Afghanistan in ICC occasions.
There are voices calling for the entire boycott of the Afghan males’s cricket workforce, saying their existence legitimises the Taliban’s ‘gender apartheid.’ Lately, Taekwondo participant Marzieh Hamidi spoke to The Hindu about how letting the lads’s cricket workforce go on normalises the Taliban. Earlier, she informed CNN how her male compatriots in taekwondo handled her like a overseas athlete after they got here head to head on the World Championships in Azerbaijan a number of years in the past.
“They are the Taliban team for me, not the Afghan team,” she was quoted then.
Members of the Afghan males’s workforce have typically been requested to touch upon the scenario however understandably maintain again pretty severely of their responses. Security of their family members could be orchestrating their silence.
“Everyone likes to see everyone play. As I said before, when it comes to politics and those things which we cannot control – we are only cricket players we can control things on the ground and we belong to the ground and we are always trying to give our best when we play,” Afghan captain Hashmatullah Shahidi stated in the course of the ongoing Champions Trophy amidst loud calls in England calling on the board to boycott their fixture towards the aspect within the match.
Distant from the political storm in Pakistan, Firooza was damage that not one participant privately reached out to the ladies who escaped.
“I wish that they had reached out to us and at least been with us. It’s easy to talk about relocation and abandoning home in a conversation like this, but we have gone through so much. Our youngest teammate was 14 when she had to leave Afghanistan. What does she know about life? It’s heartbreaking that the Afghanistan men’s team never came to us and at least talked to us and asked us how we are doing and feeling.”
Anguish turns to anger when Firooza mentions the ICC – cricket’s world physique – and the ACB.
“We didn’t have a choice. We left our country to stay alive. We expected the ACB to support us. But they didn’t. When we moved to Australia, we wrote to the ICC but they said nothing apart from ‘We’re glad you’re safe.’ That’s not something we were asking for.
“We die every day because the dream we all collectively saw is broken. We spent so many years of our lives trying to be cricketers. All for what? They are breaking their own rules as a governing body, as an international council. A full member nation must have a women’s team and men’s team and Afghanistan doesn’t have that.”
The ACB nonetheless receives full funding from the ICC regardless of these developments, a severely criticised reality in cricket’s public sphere.
“They are still sending the funds back home to Afghanistan. ACB doesn’t accept us because of the danger to them. Fine. What about the ICC? They can recognise a refugee team and divert funding here for us to play the sport we have fought so long to pursue,” Firooza fumes.
Whereas the exhibition recreation is a begin, for these ladies, even escaping the Taliban has not allow them to escape the results of the regime and the doorways it has shut for them. Jones together with a number of key members of Australia’s sporting ecosystem ultimately arrange a fundraiser referred to as Pitch Our Future for the Afghan women. This drive goals to lift AUD 1.5m to fund a three-year program. It seeks to cowl English Language Certification, Excessive Faculty and Tertiary Schooling scholarships, specialised cricket teaching, assist (bodily and psychological) and enjoying alternatives for these ladies.
“Somehow, I hope this ends with us getting the right to represent Afghanistan again. To be recognised as our nation’s team,” Firooza says, her voice cracking as she explains.
The spirit of her metropolis lives on in Firooza, as that of Kabul, Kandahar, and different Afghan areas survive within the ladies who left their souls behind at house.
However the Afghan spirit won’t ever die. In a regime that forbids their voices from being heard, these ladies are screaming for justice. It’s time for authority to pay attention.
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