America's North Shore Journal

Telegraph Media Group Limited

Upended cardboard boxes or chiselled masonry are used for wickets, balls are often made from bundles of elastic bands and the bats have seen better days, but as the sun sets over Kabul, a field next to the Afghan national stadium is alive with what is becoming an Afghan national obsession.

Formerly the scene of public executions during the era of Taliban government, the only bullets flying today are off the bats of Afghanistan’s fanatical young cricketers.

Cricket has seized the popular imagination in Afghanistan since 2001, a country where the game was unknown until waves of refugees fleeing 30 years of fighting picked it up in camps along the Pakistan border.

Earlier this month Afghanistan’s fledgling national side came from nowhere to win the Asia Cricket Council’s Twenty20 Cup in Kuwait.

It was not a competition for the giants of world cricket, but in the Long Room at Lord’s, eyebrows were raised and Matthew Fleming, a former England one-day international player and Kent captain, was sent to Kabul on a four-day fact-finding mission.

Resplendent in MCC tie and with a discreet bodyguard from the British Embassy hovering at his elbow, Fleming watched this week as the national side went through their paces in four roughly constructed concrete nets.

“There is huge sympathy and admiration in the MCC for what Afghan cricketers are achieving,” he said.