English cricket’s Afghan problem highlights the game’s lack of leadership - Chris Waters

The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) was swift to respond, apologising to everybody who has been “discriminated against and excluded”, and promising to increase funding, pay and playing opportunities.

Can anyone explain, therefore, how the ICEC report, and the ECB’s reaction to it and ambition to make cricket "the country’s most inclusive sport”, that most sickly of soundbites, chimes with the governing body’s decision not to boycott next month’s Champions Trophy game Afghanistan, the hot potato of the hour getting hotter by the minute?

It doesn’t. Rather, it highlights the glaring lack of leadership in the sport - both in terms of our own administrators (unless pushing concepts like The Hundred, the only thing they’re expert at) and, with regard to this particular subject, at the International Cricket Council (ICC), the game’s so-called governing body.

As you will no doubt be aware, any imbalances highlighted by the ICEC report pale into piffling insignificance compared with the plight of women and girls under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

As Janice Turner has written in The Times, the Taliban has “already banned them from school, college, beauty salons, stadiums (unless being stoned or whipped), gyms and parks; they can no longer train as nurses or be treated by male medics (thus denying them all healthcare); they can’t play sport, drive, dance, sing, travel alone or work. Their faces are banned from view, their voices from being heard, even in prayer.

"Now a new Taliban edict has banned windows through which women might be glimpsed in their kitchens. So not only are they locked away, they can’t even look outside.”

And yet this Champions Trophy match between England and Afghanistan is scheduled to go ahead as planned in Lahore on February 26.

Why? And why is the ICC still allowing Afghanistan to take part in such competitions, especially as Afghanistan already flouts ICC rules (without sanction) that demand countries support and fund the women’s game?

Last year, the ECB said it would not arrange bilateral series with Afghanistan while its women were shackled by gender apartheid. It was the right thing to do - and the easy thing to do, with no fixtures then scheduled between the sides.

But then the ICC released the Champions Trophy schedule on Christmas Eve, which pitted England in Group B along with Afghanistan, South Africa and Australia, the latter also apparently affected by bilateral series double standards.

Since then, and as oppression of Afghan women and girls seemingly worsens by the second, there has been an increasing clamour for the ECB to act, culminating in over 160 UK politicians this week signing a letter demanding that they do so.

The ECB’s response was bang on the button in one respect. “While there has not been a consensus on further international action within the ICC, the ECB will continue to actively advocate for such measures,” it said. “A coordinated, ICC-wide approach would be significantly more impactful than unilateral actions by individual members.”

Quite so. As Downing Street stressed on Tuesday, it is the ICC that should take the lead on this issue, not the ECB, just as a worldwide ostracising of South Africa helped against apartheid.

Cricket is good propaganda for the Taliban leaders, who often like to pose with their best players (men’s players, obviously). But the ICC and its leadership is toothless. Consequently, it is putting the ECB and others in a tricky situation.

At the same time, the ECB says “it’s crucial to recognise the importance of cricket as a source of hope and positivity for many Afghans, including those displaced from the country”. This, it seems to me, is a weak defence of its own inaction, a bit like looking for the silver lining in Nazi Germany.

One can always argue that human rights abuses occur in many places, that double standards are everywhere.

One can always contend that sport and politics should be kept apart (an absurd idea, for sport is part of life) and shrug: “It’s not our problem.”

Or maybe, just maybe, sporting leaders paid a hefty whack could put their heads above the parapet and stand up for the rights of women who, after all, do make up around 50 per cent of the human race.

In England, the ICEC report decreed that “women have little or no power, voice or influence within cricket’s decision-making structures”.

In Afghanistan, they have no power, voice or influence in life full-stop.