Afghanistan cricket team head coach Rashid Latif has said the International Cricket Council has taken a right decision to reduce the number of teams to 10 in the next World …
In the Guardian, Tim Dowling reviews the Out of the Ashes documentary about the astonishing rise of the Afghanistan team, and says that it has almost everything – but could have done with a little more cricket….
Paul Croughton, in the Sunday Times, writes of how Sam Mendes, the highly-acclaimed director of the Oscar-winning American Beauty, was prompted to co-produce a documentary, Out of the Ashes, about the rise of the Afghanistan cricket team. The film follows the team’s coach, Taj Malik, as he prepares his charges for one of the first rounds of the World Cup qualifiers, division five of the World Cricket League, in Jersey in 2008, against such cricketing minnows as Japan and Nepal. Taj is filmic gold, the same sort of bumbling hero…
The strike had threatened to boycott the tour of Netherlands in July
A team which had originally been eliminated, has been reinstated to Etisalat Afghanistan Domestic fifty-over tournament, the country’s main inter-provincial tournament, after its supporters staged a four-hour pitch invasion demanding a change to the events rules for determining semi-finalists according to a report on The Cricket Post website. The report tells how Khost supporters’ sit-in only ceased once the Afghanistan Cricket Board altered the rules so Khost would continue competing in the tournament. Under the original format, the two winners in each group with the highest run-rate were to proceed…
Mike Atherton, writing in the Times, reviews the film Out of the Ashes, a remarkable story of the Afghanistan cricket team that put up a brave show at the World Twenty20 this year. It begins with a group of cricketers playing, not in whites, but in shalwar kameez and tracks their progress to the international scene. Filming in Afghanistan, in the middle of a war, does not sound the easiest of tasks, but Albone told me this week that only once, returning from Jalalabad, when they were held up by…
Spending a day with the Afghanistan cricket team can be an unusual experience, as Andy Bull found out. Read his account of the encounter in the Guardian. I would have liked to talk to them about how batsman Raees Ahmadzai was carried across the border to Pakistan in the 1980s as his family fled from the Soviet invasion. About how he and the others learned to play cricket in a refugee camp using balls made out of old torn up shirts and stumps made out of shoes. What I ended…