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.
