Afghanistan Taliban crisis: Hardline rulers may allow series against India in 2022, Test against Aus approved

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Kabul, September 2: Since Taliban has captured the administration of Afghanistan, the fate of sports, especially that of cricket, has come under scanner because the hardline Islamic group generally does not encourage entertainment forms.

During their first stint in the early 2000s, the Taliban had banned most forms of entertainment, including sports, and many Afghanistan sportspersons, including cricketers, had to leave the country to train elsewhere. It may be recalled that Afghan cricketers had trained in Noida and Dharamshala a few years back.

But this time, there is some ray of hope that as the Taliban administration has promised to take a much lenient view of sports and offered all support to cricket, the most popular sport in Afghanistan and even among the hardliners.

Afghanistan have to imminent national assignments - the T20 World Cup in the UAE starting from October 17 and a one-off Test against Australia in November. Additionally, several Afghanistan players are involved in the Indian Premier League (IPL 2021) too, starting on September 19 in the UAE.

Now, it has emerged that all these will be go ahead as scheduled and the Taliban will not scuttle them while imposing their way of administration. In fact, the Taliban has approved Afghanistan's Test against Australia. Some Taliban leaders had recently visited the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) office in Kabul and held discussion with board CEO Hamid Shinwari to chalk out a way ahead.

Afghanistan's relation with India too has come under focus as Taliban returned to power, and recently Deepak Mithal, the Indian ambassador to Qatar, had held talks with Taliban representatives on a wide ranging issues including evacuating the Indian citizens stranded in Afghanistan.

Following that, Shinwari said the Taliban was keen to continue the thriving sporting relation between Afghanistan and India especially on the cricketing front. Shinwari hoped that Taliban would approve a proposed away series against India in the first quarter of 2022.