ACS Overseas First-Class Annual 2018

Afghanistan in 2017/18 Afghanistan marked their arrival as a Full Member of ICC by staging two similar but separate domestic first-class tournaments in the 2017/18 season. The first, held between October and December and known as the Ahmad Shah Abdali Four-Day Tournament, featured five regional teams representing between them virtually the whole of the country: Amo (north), Band-e-Amir (central), Boost (west), Mis Ainak (south-east) and Speen Ghar (east). For the second, between March and May, a sponsor’s name was added (Alokozay – a Dubai-based consumer goods company), along with a sixth team representing the capital Kabul, to complete the geographical coverage. Both tournaments were held on a league basis, with a final match between the top two teams to decide the overall winners. Both were won by the same team, Band-e-Amir, in each case after they had finished a narrow second in the league table. The tournaments provided a rare treat for the statisticians. The first one got off to a flying start when 18-year-old Bahir Shah (Speen Ghar) scored 256* in his, and his team’s, opening match, his captain declaring when he was only four runs short of equalling the highest debut innings anywhere. He followed that with scores of 34, 11, 111, 116 and 303*, and it seemed that a new star had arrived. Unsurprisingly he ended the first tournament as its leading run-scorer, with 1096 runs at an average of 121.77. He was not alone in making an early mark, as among other things the tournament also featured a wicket-keeper scoring a century in each innings on his first-class debut, a batsman hitting 13 sixes in an innings of 153, and a 16-year-old debutant taking six wickets in an innings in the final. On top of that, three batsmen – all from Mis Ainak, and all in different matches – were dismissed ‘obstructing the field’, while the final also produced further records, as Band-e-Amir defeated a Bahir Shah-less Speen Ghar by the little matter of 537 runs. The second tournament also produced a new batting star. For Amo, Darwish Rasooli – another 18-year-old – began his first-class career with scores of 154, 249, 62, 32 and 200*. He made no further centuries, but still ended as the leading runscorer of the second tournament, with 1073 runs at 82.53. And on top of this, he also took wickets with the third and fifth balls that he bowled in first-class cricket. Another star was Shafiqullah Shinwari (Kabul), who took the record-books apart in April with an innings of 200* made off only 89 balls, including 22 sixes – and all off genuine bowlers. This time Band-e-Amir’s victory in the final, against Amo, was on first innings in a drawn game. In the 52-match first-class season as a whole, 14 players – ten of them in their debut seasons – passed 1000 runs, with Zia-ul-Haq (Band-e-Amir) proving the most consistent batsmen across the two tournaments by aggregating 1616 runs at 59.85. Among the bowlers, Zia-ur-Rehman (Mis Ainak) took 101 wickets at 19.75, to make Afghanistan only the third country after England and Pakistan in which a bowler has taken 100 wickets in a season in domestic matches alone. It was his debut season too. Like all the leading wicket-takers, Zia-ur-Rehman was a spin bowler (slow left-arm in his case); successful quicker bowlers were in much shorter supply. These two tournaments might have been the ideal opportunity for players to press their case for inclusion in Afghanistan’s Test team when they made their debut at that level later in 2018; but not so. None of those named above got a look-in in the Test squad. Indeed, only five of the country’s inaugural Test XI had played any domestic cricket in 2017/18, and none could claim their selection resulted from their performances in these matches. This makes it difficult to judge the standard of the domestic tournaments, but the point must be made that a high proportion of those turning out in these matches were young cricketers with very little experience behind them. During the season, three 15-year-olds and ten 16-year-olds appeared in the domestic tournaments, and over half of those playing in them had been born after 1 January 1997. Afghan cricket is itself very young, of course, and nowhere was this made clearer than in these figures. 11