Pushed from one home, Afghan women find refuge at the home of cricket

By Enakshi Rajvanshi

Nearly five years on from being forced out of the game in Afghanistan, that country’s exiled women cricketers are set for a landmark summer in England.

The tour, starting on June 22, will give the Afghan Refugee Women’s Team the chance to train at a high level and play a series of T20 matches, with support from the Marylebone Cricket Club and the MCC Foundation. They will also be at Lord’s to watch the ICC Women’s T20 World Cup final, which feels fitting in its own way, as players pushed from one home find themselves at the long-regarded Home of Cricket.

Before the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, many of these players were centrally contracted by the Afghanistan Cricket Board. That world disappeared. Women were not only shut out of cricket, but of public life altogether: barred from universities, parks and public spaces, with sport only one part of the wider erasure.

Some athletes were forced to burn their kits to avoid being identified, while Ahmadullah Wasiq, deputy head of the Taliban’s cultural commission, said at the time, “I don’t think women will be allowed to play cricket because it is not necessary that women should play cricket.”

That sentence has hung over Afghan women’s sport ever since. But so has the refusal of these players to let that be the end of their story.

Seventeen of these formerly ACB-contracted players were helped to safety and resettled in Australia. Formal recognition as a national team in exile remains out of reach, but they found a way to play during the 2025 Women’s Ashes series in Australia, turning out as an Afghanistan Women’s XI against a Cricket Without Borders side at Junction Oval, the timing symbolic on the morning before the day-night Ashes Test began at the nearby MCG. Various passages of play had their moments, but what shone through above all was the hunger from these players to represent themselves and maintain their claim to their identity.

The upcoming trip to England is the next major step. Mel Jones, who helped organise the path out for players fleeing Afghanistan in 2021, believes that this next moment carries a deeper meaning. “This tour is a major step forward, but also highlights how much work remains," Jones said. "These players have shown extraordinary courage and commitment to the game, despite everything that has been taken from them. They deserve more opportunities like this, they deserve to be recognised as part of the global cricket community.”

The tour builds on work already underway by the International Cricket Council (ICC). In April 2025, the governing body announced a dedicated task force to support displaced Afghan women cricketers, backed by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) and Cricket Australia (CA). The initiative included a support fund and a high-performance program to give players access to coaching and facilities. But the wider issue has not gone away. Afghanistan remains a Full Member despite not having an active women’s team, a breach of ICC membership rules, while the ICC is belatedly attempting to offset that breach with practical support.

Last year, 17 exiled Afghanistan players were invited to the Women’s ODI World Cup opener in Guwahati and trained in Bengaluru as part of the wider ICC-backed program, as ESPNcricinfo reported. Those moments matter, because they keep the players connected to elite cricket. But they also lead to the next question: if tours, camps and World Cup visits are now possible, is there eventually a way for these players to take part in tournaments too?

Football has already provided a blueprint. As reported by The Guardian, FIFA recently allowed a refugee squad known as Afghan Women United to represent Afghanistan in international competition without requiring approval from the Taliban. By bypassing the domestic federation, football found a way for displaced athletes to hold on to both their sporting and national identity, a move that raises the question of how far cricket is eventually willing to go.

During the Paris 2024 Olympics, Afghan refugee breakdancer Manizha Talash was disqualified after displaying a cape that read “free Afghan women”. Her isolation emphasised how the burden of speaking up can fall on so few athletes, and why different sports needs their own collective solutions to give players back both their voice and their flag.

For now, this England tour is something to build on: not a final answer, but a step forward. A team that might easily have been lost to the game, and may yet be without continued support, is for now gaining training, matches, and overdue visibility.

They will walk into Lord's as cricketers, fueled by the ambition that one day they might have the chance to go a step further than watching from the stands. The dream must still be to compete on the field, representing Afghanistan in qualifiers and global tournaments just as their male counterparts are still able to do.