New Delhi: Manish Kumar remembers former Afghanistan cricket captain Asghar Afghan jogging unannounced into the Shaheed Vijay Singh Pathik Sports Complex in Greater Noida one evening.
“We were working out on the ground; it was evening by then, and the team had left in the morning,” the senior pitch curator at the facility tells ThePrint. “Suddenly Asghar showed up.”
Bored from sitting at his hotel all evening, the 31-year-old right-handed batsman decided to go for a jog, making to the sports complex from the Crowne Plaza hotel, a distance of eight kilometres.
Kumar, whose tight-lipped smile refuses to reveal the pitch conditions preferred by the team during practice, speaks of Asghar with a familiar fondness. “He’s just like M.S. Dhoni, calm, composed and collected on and off the field,” he says.
“Rashid Khan is a little aggressive,” Kumar says of the leg spinner, “but that’s just a reflection of his focus and passion for the game. He’s just 20 but you could see the potential from the very start.”
The likes of Asghar Afghan and his teammates — a formidable trio of spinners in Rashid Khan, Mohammad Nabi and 18-year-old Mujeeb Ur Rahman, for example, aren’t out-of-reach international cricketing stars for Kumar and his managerial staff. They are athletes “who love the simple ginger-tea in my office,” and “sometimes ask us to play when they need extra fielders”.
The sprawling 40-acre property in Greater Noida has been the Afghanistan cricket team’s home-ground since late 2015, when the Board Of Control For Cricket In India (BCCI) offered it to them in a bid, as then BCCI secretary Anurag Thakur said at the time, to “expand the game globally and help associate and affiliate members of ICC”.
The support extended to Afghan players by their host country, however, stretches far beyond mere logistics — it has also become a matter of loyalty.
“When an India vs Afghanistan match is on, even I’m confused about who to cheer for,” says Kumar, as manager of the Pathik Sports Complex Amit Singh nods in agreement. “We know them, we’ve seen them practice, and we can’t help but be happy for their success.”
On the other side of the friendly-fence, newly-appointed chargé d’affaires of the Afghanistan embassy in New Delhi, Tahir Qadiry, echoes the sentiment.
“India has been a mentor to the Afghanistan team, helping and supporting them fully during this time,” he tells ThePrint. “India is one of the only regional countries contributing in different spheres in Afghanistan and cricket is one of the biggest ones in fact.”
“Cricket links us to our national identity, to unity and harmony, and India’s support in nurturing the team is appreciated very much by the Afghans,” he adds, “Especially with the recent decision to give us homes in both Greater Noida and Dehradun.”
“Whoever wins, both the nations win, and that is a true victory for diplomacy.”
Back at the stadium, Singh laughs. “Yes, India’s second cricket team,” he says, agreeing that perhaps there really isn’t a better way to describe Asghar’s squad.
Now, carrying an ‘Amul’ logo on their jerseys, hosting international matches in Dehradun, and giving veteran cricketers a run for their money in the Indian Premier League, Team Afghanistan is being fully reared and raised on desi soil — resulting in a feel-good win for India’s soft-power strategy in the region, and a much-needed mentor for the war-ravaged country witnessing a meteoric rise in the sport.
Also read: What England & Wales Cricket Board could do to prevent washouts at ICC Cricket World Cup
A place to call home
Greater Noida and Dehradun aren’t the only homes that India has offered Afghanistan cricket — the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) is looking towards Lucknow for a third base, while the Indian government is even building two in the team’s country.
“India has always helped us — whether it’s for preparation, practice or even giving us home-grounds, it’s always been an ally for the team,” ACB CEO Asadullah Khan told ThePrint.
As of 2014, the Indian government had approved a $1 million grant to build a cricket stadium in Kandahar — a Taliban stronghold — on 44 acres of donated land. Four years later, India’s then-ambassador to Kabul, Manpreet Vohra, announced an additional “$3,60,0000 to build a guest house and a gymnasium” there.
A stadium in Mazar-e-Sharif, the Afghan ambassador’s home-town, was also developed, in addition to a football ground and a sports facility in Afghanistan’s western province of Ghor being announced just this year.
India’s presence in Afghanistan is ubiquitous — from an Afghan parliament worth $90 million, a $290 million dollar Friendship dam, to highways, hospitals, and the potential of multi-billion dollar bilateral trade. Cricket can easily be seen as the celebratory cherry on the proverbial cake.
Buttering them up
It’s not just the government and BCCI that is fostering Afghani cricket on Indian soil — even the likes of the Anand Milk Union Limited or Amul have capitalised on the opportunity to be visible on the World Cup stage.
The Indian cooperative dairy company, managed under the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), is sponsoring the Afghan team for the first time, having previously been associated with New Zealand and the Netherlands.
“The AMUL logo will appear on the leading arm of Afghanistan team players jerseys as well as on the training kits throughout the World Cup from May 30 to July 14, 2019,” their press release reads. The cooperative also reportedly exports products worth around Rs 200 crore annually to Afghanistan — a trade that established itself over two decades ago.
The choice of Afghanistan for Amul isn’t entirely a matter of just smart economics either. GCMMF’s managing director Dr R.S. Sodhi points out that “Amul and Afghanistan share an old association”.
“Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, popularly known as Frontier Gandhi had visited Amul in 1969 and had met Dr V. Kurien and studied the activities of our dairy cooperative,” he says, adding that “subsequently several delegations of women milk producers from Afghanistan have visited Amul.”
Khan, a Pakhtun or Pathan from what is the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, was a legendary freedom fighter in India, spending the majority of his life preaching communal amity and resisting the partition of the nation.
His contribution, specifically the non-violent political mobilisation of the Pathan community — to which both Rashid Khan and Mohammad Nabi belong — is celebrated in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan to such a degree, that when the Afghan-based Tehrik-e-Taliban came under the spotlight for the 2016 attack on Bacha Khan University in Pakistan, the freedom fighter’s grand-daughter Yasmin Nigar Khan argued that “Frontier Gandhi is held in such high esteem in Afghanistan that even terrorists from that country would not attack anything named after him”.
For both the ACB and Afghan diplomats in the Indian capital, Amul’s sponsorship is a welcome move that, as Qadiry told ThePrint, will “take diplomacy between India and Afghanistan to the next level”.
The IPL connection
Rashid Khan leaking 110 runs in nine overs against England at Old Trafford isn’t the only thing that makes him an expensive bowler — quite literally, he is an expensive proposition.
In 2017, the then 18-year-old leg-spinner became the first cricketer from Afghanistan to feature in the cash-rich Indian Premier League (IPL), being bought by Sunrisers Hyderabad for an impressive Rs 4 crore. The Pathan featured in 14 games that season, picking up 17 wickets at an economy of 6.63.
Khan’s teammate, Mohammad Nabi, who exceeds him in age by almost two decades, joined him in the Sunrisers shortly after. Mujeeb Zadran, the mystery spinner from Khost, who joined Kings XI Punjab (KXIP) a year later in 2018, was the youngest player ever to make a debut in the league — he was then just 17 years 11 days old.
The following year, SRH was so desperate to hold onto their star bowler, that they used the Right to Match (RTM) card to retain Khan from the clutches of Kings XI Punjab for a staggering Rs 9 crore or $ 1.41 million.
Afghanistan’s first cricketing “million dollar baby,” told Shekhar Gupta during a 2018 Walk the Talk interview that playing in the IPL gave him “a lot of confidence”.
“The support and motivation from the players, coaching staff and the people, really taught me what I am and what I am capable of doing.”
‘They wanted me to study and become a doctor,” Khan told Gupta, while Nabi said that he would “often hide and play cricket, using a tennis ball.”
And now, getting to play with the likes of Ben Stokes, Virat Kohli, Chris Gayle and Kane Williamson to name a few, Khan isn’t off-the-mark when he says that “if you perform here (IPL) it can change your career.”
Also read: India vs Pakistan isn’t about the cricket anymore. It’s just hype and jingoism