Ireland are going to host Afghanistan for a five-ODI series in August later this year, but it has been a tough decision.
The Taliban, ever since they came back into power in the Central Asian country in 2021, have been very hard on women as per their doctrine, dictating how women and girls should live, without education and other rights.
Two of the biggest cricketing nations in the world, Australia and England, have avoided playing Afghanistan in a bilateral series on moral grounds. So when Cricket Ireland (CI) decided to go ahead with the five-match series, it surprised many.
The good thing is they are not being hypocritical. They have explained their decision very well. And they are not just inviting the men’s team to play, they are also inviting Afghanistan’s women’s cricket team, currently in exile, to play cricket in Ireland.
Sarah Keane, chief executive at the CI, has acknowledged that the decision to invite Afghanistan’s men’s team wasn’t easy by any means. And she explained one of the reasons as to why they had done it: they had done it after seeing that, within the Olympic Movement, Russian athletes were not being judged for their government’s actions anymore.
Seems like boycotting is not the best option!
“Cricket Ireland has made a decision to play Afghanistan in Belfast this year. I’m not going to fob you off by saying that there’s financial reasons and there’s legal reasons. There aren’t. This has been a decision by Cricket Ireland in what it believes is the best interest of the organisation as a whole, and the decision was made by the board this week.
“I want to acknowledge up front the moral discomfort that I think we all sit with around this decision and are clear abhorrence of how the regime treats women in particular, but we also see it very much as an opportunity to reference the Afghan women’s team, the displaced team.
“We didn’t just invite the Afghan men to come here. We’ve also invited the Afghan women’s team to come here, and we’re in discussions around how that might happen. Scheduling would be a problem for this year, but it’s really important that they don’t fall off the agenda because if you decide not to play and you decide not to talk about it, then they’re not on the agenda.
“We need the plight of the Afghan women’s team to be very much on the agenda. They need to be supported and a lot of work has been done by the ICC and others to put a fund together to try and support them,” she said.
