History of Afghanistan Cricket: ODI Status to Test Cricket

In April 2009 Afghanistan had never played a one-day international. Fifteen years later it had beaten England, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Australia and New Zealand at global tournaments, held Test status, and supplied one of the most valuable bowlers in every franchise league on the calendar. No national side has ever travelled that distance in that time, and none has done it while unable to host a single home match on its own soil.

That is the achievement, and it should not be softened. It also sits alongside circumstances that no other Full Member has faced, and this page states those plainly too. What follows covers the national team from ODI status onward. How the game reached Afghanistan in the first place, through the refugee camps around Peshawar and Quetta and the climb up the ICC divisions, is told in our origin of cricket in Afghanistan. The wider set of national accounts sits in our cricket history index.

A note on our statistics

Before the history, a disclosure about what this site can and cannot show you.

The international scorecard database this site draws on withholds Afghanistan men's international matches as a matter of its own editorial policy. That data is simply not present in the feed we compute from. As a result, we cannot generate Afghan international career figures, and you will not find Test, ODI or T20I aggregates for Afghan players on our pages, however well known those players are.

Where we quote our own numbers on this page, they come from the competitions we do hold complete records for: the Indian Premier League and the Big Bash League. Everything else here is stated qualitatively or from the public record, and we have preferred a vague true sentence to a precise borrowed one throughout.

2009 to 2013: an international side with no fixture list

Afghanistan came out of the 2009 World Cup Qualifier in South Africa with one-day international status and, immediately afterwards, the problem that comes with it. ODI status entitles a team to play one-day internationals. It does not oblige anybody to schedule them.

The first years were therefore spent in the associate calendar: the World Cricket League Championship, the Intercontinental Cup, qualifying tournaments and occasional bilateral series against Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Kenya and Canada. Full Members played Afghanistan rarely and reluctantly.

Within that narrow window the side was very good. Afghanistan won the ICC Intercontinental Cup, the four-day competition for non-Test nations, in the 2009-10 cycle, beating Scotland in the final in Dubai, and won the tournament again in the 2015-17 edition. Those matches mattered more than their profile suggests: they were the only long-form cricket the players had, and they were the evidence that would later be put in front of the ICC in support of Test status.

The 2010 World Twenty20 in the Caribbean brought the first appearance at a global event, nine years after Afghanistan joined the ICC as an affiliate. India and South Africa were the opponents and both won comfortably. The point of the appearance was not the result.

The first breakthroughs

Afghanistan's first win over a Test-playing nation in a one-day international came at the 2014 Asia Cup in Bangladesh, when it beat the hosts at Fatullah. The side had also qualified for the 2015 World Cup by finishing in the top two of the World Cricket League Championship, which was the harder achievement and the one that changed the schedule permanently.

The squad of that period was built around men who had learned the game in exile. Nowroz Mangal and Asghar Afghan captained. Mohammad Shahzad kept wicket and batted with a freedom that made him the side's first genuine crowd favourite. Hamid Hassan bowled fast, wore a headband, and celebrated wickets in a manner that turned him into the team's public face. Samiullah Shenwari and Karim Sadiq provided the middle order. Shapoor Zadran ran in from a great distance with long hair and left-arm pace.

The 2015 World Cup

Afghanistan's first World Cup, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, produced one win in six matches, and that one win is among the more remarkable results in the tournament's history.

Against Scotland at Dunedin, chasing 211, Afghanistan slid to a position from which the match looked lost. Samiullah Shenwari made 96 and put on a long stand for the ninth wicket. The last pair got the runs with three balls remaining, Shapoor Zadran hitting the winning boundary and setting off on a celebration that ran the length of the ground. Afghanistan had won a World Cup match at its first attempt.

The rest of the tournament was instructive in a different way. Australia scored heavily against Afghanistan at Perth, and the gap between an associate side playing occasional cricket and a Full Member playing continuously was on plain display. Both facts were true at once, and the ICC's subsequent decision to cut the 2019 World Cup to ten teams was widely criticised precisely because Afghanistan's Dunedin win had demonstrated what the qualifying route could produce.

The following year, at the 2016 World Twenty20 in India, Afghanistan beat the West Indies in a group match at Nagpur. The West Indies went on to win the tournament.

Rashid Khan

Rashid Khan made his international debut as an eighteen-year-old in 2015 and within two years was among the most sought-after bowlers in the sport.

The action is unusual and worth describing. He runs in briskly, delivers from a low, quick arm with almost no loop, and bowls leg-spin at a pace closer to a slow-medium bowler's than a conventional wrist-spinner's. The googly is disguised to the point that batsmen at the highest level have spent whole innings unable to pick it. Because the ball arrives fast and flat, sweeping is difficult and stepping down the pitch is close to impossible. He concedes very little and takes wickets while doing so, which is a combination the format was not supposed to allow.

He reached a hundred one-day international wickets faster, in matches played, than any bowler before him. In 2018, aged twenty, he captained Afghanistan in a Test match, making him the youngest Test captain the game has had.

Our own franchise records give a sense of the scale of his club career. In the IPL, where he has played for Sunrisers Hyderabad and Gujarat Titans, our figures show 179 wickets in 153 matches at an economy rate of 7.28 and an average of 24.02 — remarkable numbers for a spinner bowling in the middle overs of a competition designed to punish exactly that. In the Big Bash League, our Adelaide Strikers records credit him with 98 wickets in 68 matches at 17.51, at an economy rate of 6.44, which is the sort of figure that used to belong to a defensive off-spinner on a slow pitch rather than to an attacking leg-spinner in a Twenty20 league.

Mohammad Nabi, Mujeeb Ur Rahman and the spin inheritance

Mohammad Nabi preceded Rashid by a decade and is the connecting figure of Afghan cricket. He played through the camps era, the associate era, the ODI era and the Test era, captained the side, bowled tight off-spin and hit long. Our IPL records cover his spells with Sunrisers Hyderabad and Mumbai Indians, where he batted at a strike rate above 143; our Melbourne Renegades records in the Big Bash show 28 wickets in 40 matches at an economy of 7.40. He remained useful in every format long after most contemporaries had stopped, and the fact that Afghan cricket has an elder statesman at all is largely because he kept going.

Mujeeb Ur Rahman arrived from the other direction. He made his one-day international debut at sixteen and was bought by an IPL franchise as a seventeen-year-old, the youngest player the auction had taken. He is nominally an off-spinner and in practice something less classifiable: he bowls the off-break, the conventional leg-break out of the front of the hand, the carrom ball and a straight one, from an action that gives away very little. Our Brisbane Heat records in the Big Bash show 37 wickets in 37 matches at an economy rate of 6.21.

Why Afghanistan produces spinners

Three of the country's four best-known bowlers spin the ball, which is not an accident and not a coaching programme.

Afghan cricketers learned the game inside Pakistani cricket culture, where wrist spin has never gone out of fashion and where a boy who can bowl a leg-break is encouraged rather than corrected. They learned it playing tape-ball cricket on hard ground, a form in which conventional swing and seam do nothing and variations of pace and grip do everything. And they learned it in a short format, where a spinner who concedes little is worth more than a fast bowler who takes wickets expensively. The mechanics behind each of these deliveries are set out in our guide to types of spin bowling. The tradition itself came across the border, and its Pakistani side is described in our history of Pakistan cricket.

Noor Ahmad, a left-arm wrist-spinner, and Qais Ahmad have continued the pattern, and Afghanistan has at times fielded three specialist spinners in a Twenty20 side without weakening it.

The franchise circuit

Afghan cricketers are now a fixture of every significant Twenty20 league in the world, and this is the single most important economic fact about the country's cricket.

The pattern began with the Indian Premier League, where Afghan spinners were among the first non-Test-nation players to be bought for large sums on merit rather than as novelties. It extended quickly. Afghan players have appeared in the Big Bash in Australia, the Caribbean Premier League, the Pakistan Super League, the Bangladesh Premier League, the Vitality Blast and The Hundred in England, the Lanka Premier League, the ILT20 in the United Arab Emirates and Major League Cricket in the United States. In some seasons a leading Afghan all-rounder will play in five or six different competitions on four continents.

Two consequences follow, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first is that Afghan players earn professional incomes that their own board could never pay them, and they acquire experience of high-pressure cricket in unfamiliar conditions that no domestic structure at home could provide. A player who has bowled the nineteenth over in a knockout match in front of forty thousand people in Ahmedabad is not going to be unsettled by a World Cup group game.

The second is dependency. When a country's best cricketers derive most of their income from clubs in other countries, the national board's leverage over its own players is limited, scheduling conflicts are constant, and workloads are set by employers rather than by selectors. Every cricketing nation now faces some version of this tension. Afghanistan faces it in the sharpest form, because it has the least alternative revenue of any Full Member and the most portable skill set on the market.

2017 and 2018: Full Membership and Test cricket

At its annual conference in London in June 2017, the ICC granted Full Membership and Test status to Afghanistan and Ireland, taking the number of Test nations to twelve. It was sixteen years since Afghanistan had joined the ICC as an affiliate.

The first Test came in June 2018, against India at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru. Afghanistan lost by an innings inside two days. The match was a chastening introduction to a format the players had barely played, against what was then among the strongest home Test sides in the game.

The correction came quickly. In March 2019, at Dehradun, Afghanistan beat Ireland by seven wickets in its second Test, with Rahmat Shah scoring the country's first Test century. It was the fastest any nation had reached a first Test win, measured in matches played.

Later that year, at Chattogram in September 2019, Afghanistan beat Bangladesh by 224 runs, with Rashid captaining and taking eleven wickets in the match. In 2021, at Abu Dhabi, Afghanistan beat Zimbabwe in a Test in which Hashmatullah Shahidi made an unbeaten double century, the first by an Afghan.

Test cricket has remained rare for the side. Fixtures are scarce, the Future Tours Programme allocates few of them, and there is no domestic first-class competition of comparable standard to prepare players in. The record is short by circumstance rather than by choice. Bangladesh's own early Test years followed a different pattern: many matches, few wins, and a long apprenticeship served in public. Afghanistan has had the opposite, a handful of Tests and a high proportion of wins among them, and both routes carry costs. A side that plays two Tests in a year cannot build the habits the format demands, however good its individual cricketers are.

2023 and 2024: the results that settled the argument

The 2023 one-day World Cup in India was the tournament in which Afghanistan stopped being a story about potential.

The side beat England at Delhi, Pakistan at Chennai, Sri Lanka at Pune and the Netherlands at Lucknow, and finished sixth in the table, ahead of England and Bangladesh among others. Ibrahim Zadran made a century against Australia in a match Afghanistan came close to winning, the first World Cup hundred by an Afghan batsman. Three of those four victories were against past world champions. Afghanistan had been the only side at the 2019 World Cup without a win; four years later it had beaten more former champions in a single tournament than most Full Members manage in a decade.

The 2024 men's T20 World Cup in the Caribbean and the United States went further. Afghanistan beat New Zealand in the group stage, then beat Australia in the Super Eight, and reached the semi-finals, where South Africa bowled the side out cheaply on a difficult pitch in Trinidad. It was the first appearance by an Afghan side in the last four of a global men's tournament, and it was achieved with the bowling attack the whole project had been built around: fast bowling from Fazalhaq Farooqi and Naveen-ul-Haq at one end and spin at the other.

The difficulties at home

None of the above was achieved from a settled base, and the difficulties should be described as they are rather than folded into the story of the results.

No home ground

Afghanistan has almost never played international cricket in Afghanistan. Grounds exist, at Kabul and near Jalalabad, and domestic cricket including the Shpageeza Twenty20 league has been played on them. International opposition has not travelled there.

The national side has therefore used a succession of adopted homes: Sharjah and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, then Greater Noida in India from 2015, then Dehradun, then the Ekana Stadium at Lucknow. India has been the principal host, and the arrangement has been generous, but it is still an arrangement. A team with a designated home venue in another country plays no true home series, banks no gate revenue, builds no home advantage and cannot bring the game to the people who follow it most closely.

Funding and structure

The Afghanistan Cricket Board has never had the revenues of a Full Member with a domestic television market. Its senior players earn the great majority of their income from franchise leagues abroad, which is both the country's largest asset and a structural dependency. Domestic first-class cricket exists but is thin. Age-group and coaching pyramids are underdeveloped relative to the standard of the senior side, which is the reverse of the usual position and has been true since the beginning.

After August 2021

The Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in August 2021. What follows is what the public record establishes.

The men's national team continued to play internationally, and the Afghanistan Cricket Board retained its Full Membership of the ICC. Domestic men's cricket continued.

Women's cricket did not. The ACB had awarded contracts to twenty-five women players in late 2020; after August 2021 those contracts were not honoured and the women's programme ceased to operate. A number of the contracted players left the country, with a substantial group settling in Australia, and have since played together as an Afghanistan women's XI in exhibition fixtures organised outside the ICC structure, including a match in Melbourne in January 2025. The restrictions placed on women's and girls' education and employment in Afghanistan since 2021 are extensively documented by international bodies.

ICC Full Membership criteria require a member to field a women's team. The ICC has not suspended Afghanistan's membership, and has instead operated a working group on the position of Afghan cricket; in 2025 it announced, together with the Indian, English and Australian boards, a support programme for displaced Afghan women cricketers. Cricket Australia has on several occasions declined to play bilateral series against Afghanistan, citing the treatment of women and girls, while continuing to meet the side in ICC tournaments. Other boards have taken different positions.

These are contested questions on which cricket's governing bodies, national boards, players and human rights organisations have taken and published differing views. This page records what has happened rather than adjudicating between them.

Afghanistan's landmarks

Landmark	When
ODI status granted	April 2009, at the World Cup Qualifier in South Africa
First global ICC event	2010 World Twenty20, in the West Indies
First Intercontinental Cup title	2009-10
First ODI win over a Test nation	2014, against Bangladesh at Fatullah
First World Cup	2015, in Australia and New Zealand
First World Cup win	2015, against Scotland at Dunedin
Full Membership and Test status	June 2017
First Test match	June 2018, against India at Bengaluru
First Test win	March 2019, against Ireland at Dehradun
Four wins at a 50-over World Cup	2023, in India
First global tournament semi-final	2024 T20 World Cup

What the side has become

Afghanistan is now a team that other sides prepare for specifically. The bowling is the reason: a spin group that can defend any total in the middle overs, fast bowlers who take wickets with the new ball, and a collective habit of bowling straight and full under pressure. The batting has taken longer, and the modern top order of Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Ibrahim Zadran and Hashmatullah Shahidi represents the first generation of Afghan batsmen developed as batsmen rather than as men who could also bat. Our Kolkata Knight Riders records in the IPL show Gurbaz scoring 363 runs in 18 innings at a strike rate of just under 135, with two fifties and a highest score of 81.

The remaining gap is the one the results cannot close. A Test side needs long-form domestic cricket, a fixture list and somewhere to play, and Afghanistan is short of all three. The players who solved the first problem — a country with no cricket producing international cricketers — did so by learning the game somewhere else and bringing it back. The second problem cannot be solved that way.

Ireland was granted Test status in the same ICC meeting and has faced a version of the same difficulty, a strong senior side, a thin professional base beneath it and a fixture list decided by other people; our history of Ireland cricket covers that parallel.

Career records for the Afghan cricketers who appear in the franchise competitions we track are on our player pages, subject to the limitation described at the top of this article, and our cricket quiz has a fair number of questions about Dunedin in 2015.