Afghanistan’s national team of women cricketers fled the Taliban in 2021 to call Melbourne their home with their new coach, Arvind Suresh, and a new team’s name: Afghan Melbourne Cricket Club.
Most stories of heroism are based on one character, but when it’s a clan of twenty-two women it becomes a story of extraordinary courage and unity. When I first heard the story of the Afghan Melbourne Cricket Club last year, I couldn’t ignore the displacement these women had faced while embracing and adjusting to a new country after fleeing the Taliban’s banning of women sports.
In August 2021, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the girls had their payments stopped and any homes of women athletes were raided or warned of ramifications. The girls fled to Pakistan to seek refuge elsewhere.
Of the twenty-five girls whose lives were shattered in a wink of an eye, twenty-two of them were granted immediate visas to Australia, two in Canada and one in England. Of the twenty-two in Australia, half are in Melbourne and the other half in Canberra. The forgotten women of Afghanistan feel that the ICC has failed them, and it was only a handful of people in Australia who left no stones unturned to make things possible for these girls.
I spoke with the Amiri sisters, the ex-captain Nazifah and team member Firoza. Their fourteen-day ordeal from Kabul to Pakistan, then Dubai, and then their final journey to Melbourne, speaks of resilience.
As a migrant, I know how hard it is to settle in another country and give up everything familiar; moreover, these women were sent into exile just for being athletes.
Nazifah, then the captain of the Afghan Melbourne Cricket Club, said the first place to be taken over by the Taliban was the city of Herat (east of Afghanistan) where they lived. She, her husband and Firoza took off to Kabul at once.
For fourteen days they tried but couldn’t go to any embassy. As soon as they returned to Herat, her teammate Nahid (now the captain of their team) called them back to Kabul, as some friends were willing to help them.
Nazifah was reluctant because she felt she was not only jeopardising her and her husband’s life, but also her young sister’s. After a full guarantee, she left for Kabul once again and would eventually reach Australia on the 15th of October.
Firoza had started playing cricket at the age of sixteen and only got contracted to the national team in January 2020. Everything changed in 2021 when their homes were raided, and they ran for their lives across the border.
Now the girls are slowly rebuilding their lives in Melbourne, adjusting to the new culture, people, and language. They didn’t waste any time picking up their cricket bats. After two months in Melbourne, they not only started playing interclub matches but also regrouped as a new local team, named the Afghan Melbourne Cricket Club.
Firoza said, “After the bad situation, it was a great time for us to play cricket. We girls just want to play cricket. Thank you [to] coach Arvind and his wife Abhi, who made this possible. My dream is not giving up and playing for Afghanistan from Australia.”
But there’s a united credit among the girls towards their coach Arvind Suresh, an engineer turned sports administrator from Chennai, India. He calls himself a cricket tragic and selflessly gives back to the sport, so much so that he also started volunteering at his local club coaching U12s.
After working for years in the sports industry in India, Arvind moved to Melbourne in 2016 to complete his Master’s in Business (Sports Management) from Deakin University. After university, Arvind was fortunate to start working full-time at Cricket Victoria in 2017. Here he met Emma Staples, who was then the Head of Diversity and Community Engagement at Cricket Victoria.
Emma approached him in early 2022 about a group of girls who had recently ‘moved’ to Australia from Afghanistan who loves cricket, and if he would be interested in a training session. The girls came to Carnegie Cricket Club.
Arvind said, “I saw them for the first time there – I distinctly remember a group of girls walking cautiously towards the ground and as they got closer, their eyes lit up seeing the cricket nets, balls, bats, and stumps! They could not control themselves and I could see their love for cricket. I fell in love with them right then!”
The next step was to find a competition for the girls to play. The Mid-Year Cricket Association was running a women's competition in winter for the first time in its history. Emma and Arvind thought that this was the perfect opportunity to get the girls into playing some matches and getting a feel for community cricket in Australia before the actual cricket season.
They made jerseys for the girls and had Mel Jones present it to them on the day of their first match. It was a very emotional moment for the team!
They won three out of six games and narrowly missed the semi-finals.
It was a learning curve for Arvind to learn about Afghanistan through their stories. He remembers a session at Monash University when one of the girls fell flat to the ground, covering her ears, after what she thought a ‘bomb’ had gone off when it was a small object that fell on an asbestos roof. “It was a very powerful moment for me personally – to be grateful for the life we are living here in Australia,” says Arvind.
We indeed take so much for granted with our freedom, when then there are girls in Afghanistan who are denied education or any recreational activities. Early marriage is the only solution for them to feel protected and protect their family.
“I don’t want to stop dreaming and I also want the girls in Afghanistan not to stop dreaming. We want to play cricket and play for Afghanistan,” Nazifah adds.
The girls found some ground when Cricket Australia announced last month that it cancelled an upcoming series against the Afghanistan men’s team, but a lot still needs to be done by Cricket Australia and the ICC. It’s time for action now, especially when the community has united to give that hope to these young athletes.
This is their home now; they are scared to contact their families back home because of concerns for their safety, and the Taliban changes their rules every day.
As Nazifah adds, cricket is a mind game and they have endured in the last sixteen months – all that is now left for them is to just play.
A special thank you to Emma Staples for bringing the story to me for G’day India; we first spoke about this story almost a year ago in a fashion show. And a special mention to Arvind’s lovely wife Abhirami Venugopal, who is also the team manager! She gets the girls pumped up every week to conquer the world!
I would just like to conclude by saying the girls could be in exile, but “Not Out.”
By Nandita Chakraborty
