Statement on ICC and the Champions Trophy

I feel a profound sense of sadness and outrage with the Champions Trophy match going ahead between England and Afghanistan today. 

Sadness and outrage at the fact that in 2021, following the Taliban regaining control of Afghanistan and banning women from sport as one of their first acts, female athletes found their homes raided, had to burn their kits to avoid being identified, and the former women’s cricket team had to flee for their safety and are now forced to live in exile.  

Sadness and outrage that since then, the men’s Afghan cricket team has been allowed to and has competed – even excelled – internationally, while their women’s team is denied the very same right.  

And sadness and outrage that, over three years since the Afghan women’s cricket team were effectively banned from playing cricket on the international stage, their situation remains much the same.  

Despite warranted expectations of support from the Afghan Cricket Board (ACB) and the International Cricket Council (ICC) and multiple attempts at engagement with them, the Afghan women’s team have been ignored by those at the top of their respective sport who seem to have washed their hands with them.  

The situation with regards to women’s cricket in Afghanistan is a clear breach of ICC regulations that supposedly require all test nations to fund and support a women’s side. It also flies in the face of their anti-discrimination and anti-corruption policies. As the international governing body for cricket the ICC have a responsibility to ensure that nations comply with their regulations, and to act when they do not.  

But act the ICC has not. In fact, there has been a complete absence of material action taken by the international body to enforce their own rules, and their relative silence on the matter has been deafening.  

Back home in Afghanistan, no new girls or women are taking up cricket, or any sport for that matter. Afghan women’s erasure from cricket forms just one element of misogyny in the extreme under Taliban rule, where women find themselves banned from education, accessing healthcare, driving, dancing, singing, walking outside alone unchaperoned, and their voices forbidden from being heard even in prayer. Most recently women have been denied their own window. 
 
This is an insidious dystopia, unfathomable to many of us here, but all too real for women in Afghanistan. Obviously, sport cannot turn this around alone. But it can use the levers available to take a stand and exert pressure, as has been done previously with sporting boycotts and team suspensions at the international level. 
Who is going to take that stand now for the women in Afghanistan? 
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Women’s erasure is not an inconvenient point of ‘political interference’ - it is a moral abhorrence. There is so much more that the international cricketing community should be doing to support the Afghan women’s team, and the broader plight of women and girls in Afghanistan.  ​