Friday 17 April 2009

Finally, some good news for Afghanistan

Afghanistan won their final match in the World Cup qualifiers in South Africa, but results elsewhere went against them.

However, they have assured themselves of One-Day International status, according to Cricinfo.

It gives me an opportunity to trot out my favourite Don Bradman quotation. Anecdotes published since his death suggest that he was a tougher old buzzard than he appeared in his lifetime, but I'd like to think he meant this, from the final chapter of "The Art of Cricket":

"there is no game - indeed is there any substitute at all - which is
better able to bring together on a common level and unite tens of
thousands of people ... different in colours, differing in religious
beliefs and in other respects but still human beings, flesh and
blood, who have a common heritage in their desire to work and play
without devastating the earth for selfish, greedy ends.

"I once spent an evening talking nothing but cricket to a team of
West Indian players. The goodwill which they so obviously exuded
because we all played and loved the same game was a thrill and lives
in my memory. I did not know their families, their homes, their
country, their mode of living, or really very much about them at all,
but we were friends in the truest sense.

"It was a great Indian, Prince Ranjitsinhji, who wrote, 'No
institution is perfect - it will always tend to excess or defect. But
how nearly perfect is cricket. It is a game which keeps boys out of
mischief. It is a training of youth for a manly life. It lays up a
store of strength and health against old age. It makes individual men
life-long friends.'"

Let it be so with Afghanistan.

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