His team not performing to standards set in the Asia Cup is just one of the many problems Afghanistan skipper Gulbadin Naib faces in this tournament. Right from star players like super spinner Rashid Khan tweeting against the sacking of Asghar Afghan as skipper for the World Cup squad, to wicket-keeper Mohammad Shahzad alleging he was sent back for an injury he never suffered, to team-mates getting involved in a Manchester bar brawl with fans filming them, to coach Phil Simmons saying he will tell all after the tournament is over — the blues seem to be getting darker in mood by the day for the proud Afghans.
Though “no comments” seems to be the only way out for Naib at Press conferences from ticklish off-field issues, he sports a disarming simplicity in admitting that the main aim of his team is to at least play the entire 50 overs, learn from the biggies on the big stage as such exposure is rare, and then hope to build from there with their cricket board managing to stitch up a bilateral away series or two with the big teams.
Now that is easier wished for than done as the FTPs of most major teams are packed to capacity and can rarely give windows to minnows unless otherwise mandated by the ICC. Even Bangladesh got very few matches in their long struggling years before they became a Test playing nation and despite many bilaterals now under their belt, they are just about coming out of their callowness.
Afghans by nature and descent are known to be proud straight mongers, so the mauling against England, especially of their star bowler Rashid Khan who returned wicketless after giving away 110 runs, especially to the bat of a marauding Eoin Morgan, will haunt the team and the bowler for a long time and can be washed away only with their next good performance.
“We played bad games but we learned a lot. Afghanistan is a growing team in world cricket and it’s a proud moment that we’re in top 10 teams now," he said, adding that "we’re learning, and it's a very good experience for us."
Indeed, playing cricket and learning well despite killing strife all around, and in a country where the sport is dangerously looked down upon by extremists, Afghan cricket has come a long way. At Asia Cup, the team of motely workers played their hearts out defeating all the other sub-continental teams, including Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka.
But the implosions came too soon and too near to the World Cup preparations. First the Afghan cricket board's CEO got sacked for yet to be explained reasons and the new guy in, the former statistician of the team, was not a seniors' man. The 11th-hour replacement of settled-in skipper Asghar Afghan by Gulbadin Naib created a rift in the team and posed major problems of handling players like Rashid on the rolls.
“If you look at my country, everything was not well for so many years, but it is not so for the past four or five years. We're doing well in every part of Afghanistan. We are here. It is not like any athletic tournament. It's the high-ranking cricket tournament. It's a World Cup. We have targeted some teams here. There was a good chance for us to beat them,” Naib pointed out.
He feels it is not lack of talent but because his boys are not performing to their optimum and that's where Afghanistan is getting extinguished. "We didn't play good cricket. It's not our level of cricket. If you look at the England match, we did well with a lot of things, especially we batted 50 overs. This is a good point," he asserted.
As compared to their big brother neighbour in Pakistan, the team is just about getting embroiled in complex issues which are ready to snowball once they return from a tournament where performances were officially admitted to be way below the expected mark. Selection blunders, administration politics, unexplained axing of fit players and a coach who refuses to renew his contract due to all the above-mentioned, Afghan cricket is too young to be waylaid from singular pursuit of climbing the ladders of the game.
They have the talent, they have the temperament and they have IPL sweethearts in the likes of Rashid Khan, their superstar spinner who many stalwarts of the game have called the best in the business.
"If we look at Rashid Khan, it's happened to every player. In cricket, you have a phase of good days and also have bad days. Rashid had a bad day against England. That's one of the bad days. Rashid is not an easy bowler. We can't play him in the nets. He's one of the strongest mind players. He learns quickly from mistakes. I saw him today and he's totally different. He doesn't think about the other day. He's just focusing on the present which is the best thing about Rashid," Naib, whose captaincy Khan has publicly gone against, says.
It is only a matter of time before Afghanistan grows into the game to be a team to reckon with. But in that interregnum, it is crucial that its cricket administration does not lose focus or plummet into dirty games and politics to stymie the journey. The need of the hour, as Naib said, was to get more playing days in the international calendars of established teams.
"We want to improve our experience. We should play against good teams like India, Australia, South Africa and Pakistan. Maybe Afghanistan will lose those matches or we will be struggling, but one day Afghanistan will be different," he promises.
His Board, he says, has been working hard at breaching the jam-packed tours schedules of these teams. They're trying to arrange good matches and series. "The schedule of top eight teams is very tight. But our Board is trying to arrange for the series, especially against Pakistan and India," Naib said.
The Afghans, for now, are on a learning curve, being coached by a series of players and former administrators of the game, India's former team manager Lalchand Rajput being one of them. He has since moved to Zimbabwe, yet another team which fell victims to its nation's politics. Current coach Phil Simmons, now so obviously on his way out, saw the talent but has been cornered and disenchanted by all the gathering madness in the method. Certainly, the Pushtoons do not need it. Much like their politics and geopolitical compulsions, their cricket too is imploding, sadly, much too close to birth.