Cricket Tasmania Pulls The Plug On Afghanistan Test Match

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ricket Tasmania has confirmed the anticipated test match between Australia and Afghanistan will be “postponed indefinitely.”

The two sides were scheduled to compete against one another in late November in Hobart. 

However, the test match was left vulnerable after Cricket Australia warned earlier last month the match would not go ahead unless the Taliban softened its stance on women playing the game. 

CA’s statement read: “If recent media reports that women’s cricket will not be supported in Afghanistan are substantiated, Cricket Australia would have no alternative but to not host Afghanistan for the proposed Test Match due to be played in Hobart.”

Now Cricket Tasmania CEO, Dominic Baker, has confirmed to Triple M the match will not go ahead but may be postponed to future notice. 

“It’ll be formally postponed indefinitely this week,” Baker said. 

“That will come out in the next couple of days.

“It’s about giving the Afghanistan government some direction around what they have to do to get back into the sport.

“It’s not acceptable that they don’t allow female sport. 

“If they want to play competitive male sport, particularly in the cricket sphere, they have to rethink what they do with female sport,” Baker said. 

Although last week, the ACB’s former women’s development manager, Tuba Sangar, said boycotting the tournament would not help and would just “destroy the hope of the Afghanistan people.”

Sangar told BBC Stumped podcast: “If the ICC or other countries boycott Afghanistan cricket, it won’t help women to play cricket.”

“A woman in Afghanistan knows about cricket because of the men‘s team.

“When Afghanistan men win a match, girls are thinking, ‘one day I should play for Afghanistan too’.

“If other countries, other worlds, take this from Afghanistan, I don’t think it will help – it will destroy the hope of the Afghanistan people,” Sangar said. 

This is now the fourth test match Cricket Australia has postponed in the calendar year after a tour of South Africa was scrapped earlier this February. 

As a result, players will enter the next Ashes with no Test experience since January.