Brendon McCullum, honorary Aussie

The New Zealand captain's attitude and approach have rubbed off on his team-mates, and they are now firm favourites for the title

McCullum's belligerent batting has won him admirers from across the ditch © Getty Images

Brendon McCullum has been a revelation for New Zealand. His no-nonsense brand of the game has captured the imagination of the cricket world.
I saw him crack that record 302 against India a while back. In 2010 I was amazed by his physical strength and resilience. On the eve of the New Zealand-Australia Test match at the Basin Reserve, I was at a centre-wicket training session with the New Zealand team, a practice called by then coach Mark Greatbatch. I was there to have a look at Daniel Vettori and spinner Jeetan Patel, and everyone, including batting coach Martin Crowe, was rugged up with sweaters and jackets against the prevailing Wellington wind, which nearly always blows up a storm.
This day it was positively chilly. Everyone was struggling to keep warm, except the bloke padded up and waiting to go in; everyone on the ground except Brendon McCullum. There he was, leaning against the net upright, his shirt rolled up high on his arm, exposing muscles that would have delighted the likes of Eddie Barlow and John Reid: tough blokes both, hard cricketers with a penchant for taking the fight to the enemy with no holds barred. On that cold, blustery day I'm sure everyone wanted to head indoors to the warmth of the dressing room, but not McCullum. Despite this being simulated match play on a centre wicket in positively Antarctic conditions, he stood with a glint in his eye like a warrior about to go to battle.
He began his career as a wicketkeeper-batsman, but it has always been his brash, crash-bang batting that has endeared him to fans. Australians don't always doff their hat to Kiwi cricketers - the Trans-Tasman rivalry has endured since Don Bradman was a boy. Perhaps it is simply big brother knowing by sheer weight of numbers they should always beat New Zealand at anything, anywhere, at any time. But what Australians do know, and don't always tell their cross-sea cousins, is that we have always admired the Kiwi spirit, and the way New Zealand always punch above their weight.
McCullum has brought great belief to New Zealand. He leads from the front, but as a captain, and we've seen it in spades this World Cup. He is like the great Australian captains such as Ian Chappell, Mark Taylor and Michael Clarke: he tries to make things happen. He works his bowlers well and is always thinking wickets. Logic demands that we seek wickets in any form of the game. Now that New Zealand have some classy quick bowlers in the form of Trent Boult and Tim Southee, it has given Daniel Vettori a new lease of life. For years opposition teams "sat" on Vettori and scored at will at the other end. Now because of Boult and Southee's other-end pressure, the veteran left-arm spinner can weave his craft more menacingly because teams will have to try and score more readily off his bowling. That will open up more opportunities for him to take wickets.

Australians don't always tell their cross-sea cousins that we have always admired the Kiwi spirit and the way in which New Zealand punch above their weight

When New Zealand beat Australia in Auckland in the much-awaited World Cup clash it was McCullum who made the brave call to introduce Vettori early in the game with Clarke's men threatening to run riot. The spinner stopped Australia in their tracks with tight, clever changes of pace bowling, proving that a slow bowler doesn't need a minefield to beat any opposition. Vettori used all the artifices of subtle change of pace. He used the crease and he wove a spell over the Australians, similar to how Sri Lanka's Rangana Herath perplexes some of Australia's leaden-footed batsmen.
Make no mistake, New Zealand are an exciting team in all forms of the game. They can thank McCullum for his belligerence and skill, his never-say-die attitude and his strength of leadership in the main. Don't forget Kane Williamson. He's all class, and is today one of the best batsmen in world cricket. His batting to steer New Zealand home the other day revealed a batsman at the top of his craft on the world stage.
New Zealand are going to be the side to beat in this competition. The way they are playing they deserve every accolade, and I can visualise McCullum raising the World Cup aloft at the end of the proceedings.

Ashley Mallett took 132 wickets in 38 Tests for Australia. He has written biographies of Clarrie Grimmett, Doug Walters, Jeff Thomson, Ian Chappell, and most recently of Dr Donald Beard, The Diggers' Doctor

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Cricketers and Cameleers from Afghanistan in Australia

  I first traveled to fabled Afghanistan in 1976 when I journeyed through  that peaceful country for 6 months working for the Red Cross  on an earthquake and then a flood operation at a time when it was such a peaceful country. Then I lived there for 3 years from 1993-96, during a period of anarchy and bloodshed. This was the time the Taliban were born and came to power. The Taliban’s never liked sport, but eventually agreed that cricket was an acceptable game. Then from 2000 to 2006, I visited Afghanistan on a regular basis and saw cricket becoming an important game in the country.  I read this article yesterday written by Christian Ryan in a bar in Melbourne, about Afghanistan cricket and Afghan cameleers. An interesting story.

Afghanistan: not jolly losers in it to make up the numbers © AFP

The bar is the Cricketers Bar. It faces out street-side from the cricket-famous Hotel Windsor. Many cricketers have stayed here. Nearly every famous cricketer of international cricket's first hundred hard-drinking years drank here. But this World Cup, six nights out of seven, only one of the bar's two TVs is switched to the cricket.
Framed team photos hang from the walls. What if they had seeing eyes, the people in these photos of cricket teams of legend - the 1868 Aboriginal team, no less? If they did, then Tarpot and Dick-a-Dick and King Cole, say, apart from seeing themselves identified by the pet names bestowed on them in the caption underneath, would have to suck up the added annoyance of staring, every night of the week bar one, at flickering re-screenings of days-old rugby matches.
The night before last, both TVs had the cricket on. Australia were playing. Never likely to be a pulsating night's cricket, it was a good night for pulse-taking. They were playing Afghanistan, a team which wasn't a team from a place where cricket wasn't seriously a thing 15 years ago. Watching Australia play, there's a community vibe normally. This night, the community had a rip in it.
Some were unaware who or even that Australia were playing. Others were feeling a tingling in pressure points that hadn't tingled for an ODI this century. Rarely since the distant decades of last century - Frank Worrell's 1960-61 West Indians and their summer-long carnival of wow - would so many Australians have minded so little if their team lost. Adding to the frisson was knowing how much the night's proceedings mattered to everyone monitoring them from faraway Kabul. Piling frisson on frisson was the start time: 2.30pm in Perth, meaning a 5.30 start and scheduled 1.30am finish on the east coast, the timeslot, minus an hour, of a UK Ashes Test, a meeting between Australia and their oldest rivals, except tonight they were playing a team with whom they shared no history and exchanged precisely zero rivalry.
For some, this had an almost painful poignancy, while for others a frisson-free autumn evening of sorely needed Australian batting practice stretched ahead. Channel Nine, having pledged to show all Australia's matches, flicked this one last-minute to one of its subsidiary channels.
In the bar, 50 blokes and four women drank, backs turned to the TVs, apart from two guys in suits, their cufflinked right hands alternating between clutching the clammy upper crest of their $3 pots and stroking their chins, rapt. When Finch was caught at slip in the third over, a few other heads looked. Then Warner took 11 runs off the eighth over, Hamid Hassan's first, and the match's allure as a win-loss spectacle was gone.

Leaving that bar, stepping out into Melbourne air, the night was crisp, still, abnormally windless.
In Kabul the forecast said it was raining, freezing, snowing.
Zero rivalry - in a cricketing sense, I'm meaning.
In the 1860s Afghan cameleers began coming out to Australia. Camels could cross gibber plains and go deep into Australia's still-mysterious interior, places where horses got thirsty or spooked. In the "ghantowns", where the cameleers lived, there were accounts of Afghans boxing, wrestling, racing camels, weightlifting, playing cards, two-up and marbles, smoking hashish out of pipes, riding bicycles, and making music out of bamboo flutes, tin whistles and three-stringed rubabs. No cricket, not that I've read. Sometimes there was a feeling that surely Australians could drive camels, who needed Afghans?

The writer Azhar Abidi went a few years ago to the old ghantown at Marree, where he met 94-year-old Aysha, who said the railway track separated Marree's blacks from whites. "Whites lived on the west side, blacks on the east," Abidi reported. "The Europeans used to smear the turnpikes with pigs' fat to stop the cameleers entering their half of town."

Australia smashed the Afghan bowlers, 417 they made. There was sadness and a hollowed-out empty feeling about this but also, again, a rip, a gap. Celebratory was the mood in the commentary box, where near-salivating and actual chortling - such as when Maxwell produced a stand-up reverse sweep off a 107kph yorker - broke out. Hassan's triumphant two-over final spell, going for four runs in the 47th over, and six in the 49th, got lost. The gap - cricket fans on one side, Australia fans on the other - felt wide.

Cricket is deep within them © AFP

It's natural that cricket's obsessives should relish the sparkle of Afghanistan's play this World Cup. The obsessive watches so much cricket, because so much cricket is on TV to watch, that the homogenised techniques of all those helmeted anonymees starts to grate. Afghanistan's players play in an unstraightened-out sort of way. Non-homogenous techniques and, just as refreshing, non-homogeneric personalities, like Javed Ahmadi's, who admitted - how many major-nation Test openers would admit this? - to trepidation at batting on the bouncy WACA. "I think Australia," Ahmadi said, "has good batting wickets. WACA is totally different. So I'm not happy to play here."
Afghanistan's batting was willing but, no surprise, not up to chasing 417. Over in the commentary box, here's Shane Warne, three interpretations of events within 15 minutes, worth quoting verbatim in all their awesomely well-meaning condescension.

WARNE (28.4 overs): "Plenty of good signs for Australia. I tell you what, though, I've been impressed by Afghanistan too, BJ. It's great to see them smiling." WARNE (30.2 overs - a 98-metre on-drive by Najibullah): "Whoa. Straight out of the screws. He likes it too. Look." (So I looked - and Najibullah looked steadfastly impassive.)
WARNE (32.2 overs): "Just to finish the point on Afghanistan and the Associate nations, BJ. I think it's been fantastic… Just because they don't perform that well, they can hold their heads up high from the way they've gone about it. They've been smiling."

As Russell Jackson, live-blogging the game, pointed out, "What's been notable… is the way they haven't smiled. They're genuine competitors. Najibullah and Zazai know they have no hope here and it looks like they're annoyed by that, not resigned to it."
In Marree, Azhar Abidi met an old man, Jabbar, son of one of the last cameleers. Have you only ever spoken English, Abidi asked him. Yes. He did not understand his ancestral language. He could not speak it - although, actually, there was one time, in a hospital ward, in extreme pain, when he was informed afterwards that he'd been babbling something. In Pashto. "Somewhere," said Jabbar, "deep inside my head I must know it."
As with the lost ancestral language of Jabbar's homeland, so it is with Afghanistan and cricket. It is in them.

Christian Ryan is a writer based in Melbourne. He is the author of Golden Boy and Australia: Story of a Cricket Country. His new book is Rock Country

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Afghanistan cricket steps onto the world stage.

I first saw cricket played in the streets of Jalalabad in 1994 when I was working in Afghanistan. It didn’t surprise me for I knew that  Afghanistan  played  Hockey in the 1956 Olympics which showed the strong influence of  leading sports in Pakistan and India, on their country.

 Hamid Hassan could have had a wicket in the third over of their first World Cup match, if Afghanistan had been quicker to adapt to DRS © Getty Images

 While I was living in Kabul during a period of total anarchy, I read in the Peshawar newspapers that the Afghan Cricket Federation  came into being and later became an affiliate member of the ICC in 2001 and a member of the Asia Cricket Council in 2003. I was deeply moved and impressed by the article written by by Will Davies on February 17 2015, in the Wall street Journal which I copy below:

 Afghan shopkeepers in Kabul watch a broadcast of a Cricket World Cup match. Photo: shah marai/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Afghans Find Passion in the Cricket World Cup

For Afghanistan, the Cricket World Cup is a big stage, one that inspires hope among a war-weary people

Wednesday is a proud day for Afghanistan as the country makes its first appearance in the Cricket World Cup.The rise of Afghan cricket is astonishing. Two decades ago, the sport was virtually unknown to Afghans. But in the midst of war, a love of cricket somehow developed. A governing body was formed. Now, 11 Afghan men will don the blue national team jersey and step out on the Manuka Oval in Canberra in front of a capacity crowd and an Afghan television audience of millions.“It is exciting, the start of the World Cup. Everyone is waiting back home, the whole nation is waiting for the match,” Afghanistan’s captain Mohammad Nabi said.Like some of his teammates, Nabi learned to play cricket in a refugee camp near Peshawar, Pakistan, where his family fled during Afghanistan’s war with the Soviet Union. He is now ranked as the world’s eighth best all-rounder, meaning he bats and bowls. He has scored more than 1,000 runs for his country.Some of those runs came in an October 2013 qualifying match against Kenya, when Nabi top-scored, helping Afghanistan book a place in this World Cup. Afghanistan has featured in international cricket tournaments before, including the World Twenty20, but the World Cup is the sport’s marquee event.Ahead of the Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, The WSJ’s Will Davies puts on some pads and tries to explain how the old English sport is played.

Afghanistan has made progress in other major sports such as soccer. The country, which is 144th in the FIFA world rankings, won the South Asian Football Championship in 2013 with a 2-0 win over India in the final in Katmandu. It also has an Olympic medalist in Rohullah Nikpai, who won bronze in taekwondo at the 2008 Games in Beijing and in London in 2012.
For Afghanistan, the Cricket World Cup is a big stage, one that inspires hope among a war-weary people. In Kabul, young men gather to play cricket on muddy grounds covered with garbage, longing for something to look up to.
“I am so proud that Afghanistan will be playing in the World Cup for the first time,” said Abdul Manan, a 15-year-old who aspires to be a professional cricketer. “I won’t miss a second of the game. Afghanistan will be playing alongside the world’s strongest cricket nations.”

 

Afghanistan's Afsar Khan Zazai plays a shot in front of India's Mahendra Singh Dhoni during a World Cup warm-up cricket match. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images 

Cricket has become the most popular sport in Afghanistan. Nisar, a worker at a sports shop in Kabul who goes by only one name, said sales of Afghanistan cricket team shirts have rocketed in recent weeks. He is now selling 30 to 40 a day.The Afghanistan Cricket Board even has a department dedicated to women’s cricket, though progress there is slower. “The ACB…is striving to ensure that young women and girls are able to enjoy and participate in the game. This development, however, must necessarily take place in the context of a traditional culture and history,” the board says, adding that the women’s game must display “great sensitivity, discretion and diplomacy.Afghanistan on Wednesday faces Bangladesh, a so-called full member of the International Cricket Council. That means it also plays test cricket—the five-day version of the game—placing it among the elite cricket nations. Until 2000, Bangladesh was an associate member, as Afghanistan is today.Bangladesh made its World Cup debut in 1999 and has caused upsets over giants such as Pakistan, England, India, South Africa and the West Indies. Bangladesh is ranked ninth in the one-day international cricket rankings. Afghanistan is 12th, but is capable of beating Bangladesh, as it did in the Asia Cup last March, the only previous meeting between the two.“They (Afghanistan) are a good team, it should be a really good match,” said former player Sunil Gavaskar, one of India’s greatest batsmen and a member of the team that won the 1983 World Cup. “It is great for cricket they are involved,” he told The Wall Street Journal.Other teams in Afghanistan’s group include 2011 finalist Sri Lanka, England and co-hosts New Zealand and Australia. Afghanistan plays Australia on the rapid surface of the WACA in Perth, where fast bowlers such as Mitchell Johnson will likely give Afghanistan players the test of their cricketing lives. 

 In their first game in the Cricket World Cup, the Afghan cricketers showed their passion for the game.

“The players are very excited. They feel a real genuine honor to be here and they want to do well for the public back home,” Afghanistan’s coach, Andy Moles, said Tuesday.
“Bangladesh is a full member side. We respect them, but we’re certainly not scared of them,” the Englishman added.
Canberra couldn’t be further removed from Kabul and the camp near Peshawar where Nabi learned to play cricket. The match on Wednesday is the first of three that the quiet, clean Australian capital will host during the World Cup. The Manuka Oval is a picturesque ground with grass banks for spectators, in addition to the stands.
The scene will surely please Taj Malik, Afghanistan’s former coach and the man credited for much of the nation’s rise in cricket. Malik’s role with Afghanistan is dramatized in the 2010 documentary “Out of the Ashes,” which follows the country’s attempt to qualify for the 2011 World Cup in the Subcontinent.
In an opening scene in a bus traveling through the hectic streets of Kabul, Malik turns to the camera and says: “There is a lot of problems in the world today. Everywhere there is conflict, fighting and injustices happening. The solution of all the problems is…cricket.”
—Margherita Stancati in Kabul contributed to this article.