In a turn of events too improbable for Hollywood, a cricketer from Afghanistan became a feted hero deep in the heart of Texas
Peter Della Penna31-Jul-2023One of the burgeoning traditions that has quickly become a staple of the first season of Major League Cricket in Texas, as it is in the IPL, is the sea of flags in the stands. Almost all of the franchises involved in each night’s match made sure to have stacks of flags ready to hand out to fans as they walked in through the gates of Grand Prairie Stadium.There were hundreds of neon green Seattle Orcas flags waving in the grandstand at Sunday night’s final. These were engulfed by thousands of blue MI New York flags. Being a sporting event in the USA, a few fans brought in Old Glory to twirl around, and another American flag arrived into the stadium before the start of play courtesy of a parachute jump team.But the flags that arguably stood out most of all at Grand Prairie Stadium were the distinct tri-colour black, red and green of Afghanistan. Seemingly in every corner of the stadium, there was at least one, and usually two, Afghanistan tricolour banners parading around and being waved in tandem.Related
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Two decades ago, when the US military invaded Afghanistan, the latter’s national cricket team did not exist. A men’s side playing under the aegis of the Afghanistan Cricket Board did not appear in an Asian Cricket Council tournament – let alone an ICC one – until June 2004. On that day, Nawroz Mangal opened the batting with a century while an unknown 19-year-old spinner named Mohammad Nabi led the bowling attack taking 3 for 28 in a four-wicket loss to Oman at an empty Royal Selangor Club in Kuala Lumpur. Rashid Khan was just a five-year-old boy then.Fast forward 19 years to a scene in Grand Prairie, Texas that would have seemed infinitely more ludicrous than the moment in “Back to the Future Part II” where Marty McFly gets out of Doc Brown’s DeLorean time machine to walk into the centre of Hill Valley in October 2015. A very confused Marty, played by Michael J Fox, looks up at a flashing neon news ticker to see an update that the Chicago Cubs have just beaten a team from Miami – a baseball franchise that didn’t exist in the Back to the Future realm of 1985 – to win their first World Series since 1908.Nicholas Pooran scored an extraordinary hundred in the chase•SportzpicsIt’s highly improbable that even the brilliant mind of Robert Zemeckis could have concocted a Hollywood story where a boy from war-torn Afghanistan in 2004 becomes one of the biggest stars in international cricket and is feted by the masses in the Lone Star State in the summer of 2023. Texas is a place with as nascent a cricket heritage as the one Afghanistan had in 2004, which was a time when most Texans’ – like most other Americans of the time – only thoughts about Afghanistan revolved around hunting down Osama bin Laden.But when Rashid showed up for his first match in Texas for New York on the night of July 17 – fresh out of a business class seat on a flight from Bangladesh where he had just finished captaining the Afghanistan T20I side – the fans in Grand Prairie Stadium went delirious. It was sheer pandemonium in the front row of section 101 on the southwest grandstand of the venue near where Rashid was fielding on the boundary at wide long-off. Things got so rowdy from a crush of fans crowding the front five rows in search of selfies and autographs during the first innings when New York were fielding that extra security guards had to be re-assigned to the area to disperse the throngs of fans who did not have tickets in the section.It was no surprise, then, that when the starting line-ups for the final on Sunday night were shouted over the loudspeakers by stadium public address announcer Aaman Patel – who himself is another too-good-to-be-true character, a North Carolina native who was one year old when Afghanistan played their first match in 2004 – that Rashid got the most raucous ovation. And even on a night when New York stand-in captain Nicholas Pooran scored one of the most extraordinary centuries in a T20 franchise league final anywhere in the world, it was Rashid who continued to be the pied piper for fans all around the ground.Rashid Khan registered figures of 4-0-9-3•SportzpicsThough the match had been announced as a sellout for weeks, there was some mild curiosity as to what the atmosphere would be like without the presence of the Texas Super Kings in the final. Though the crowds at the 7200-capacity Grand Prairie Stadium had been consistently healthy throughout the tournament, only matches involving the hometown Super Kings had been sellouts prior to the final. But the long traffic lines coming off the South Belt Line Road Exit to the stadium entrance at Lone Star Parkway, which were snaking around the adjacent Lone Star Racetrack parking lot 90 minutes before play, quelled any doubts that the inaugural MLC final would be anything less than a grand occasion.As special as Pooran’s unbeaten and chanceless 137 not out off 55 balls was – studded with 13 sixes and a hundred which arrived after just 40 balls – the screams, shouts and cries for Rashid before, during and after his sensational spell of 3 for 9 (seriously?! A 2.25 economy and 19 dot balls on a night when every other bowler went for more than a run a ball) were relentless from start to finish, and continued well after Pooran jammed out a yorker through fine leg for the winning runs. During the victory celebrations on the field, there were regular calls in the stands from fans shouting for an autograph or a selfie with, “Nicky!”, “Polly!” “Trent!” and “David!”But outside of the appearance made by New York’s billionaire owner Nita Ambani, who showed up along the sidelines to take pictures with her team’s joyous fans, the only other person requiring a robust security presence to keep over-exuberant fans from losing control in their zesty fervour to get close to their hero was “Rashid! Rashid!” After spending a considerable amount of time taking selfies and signing autographs with fans, Rashid was finally yanked away by the New York team officials, who were waiting for him to come back to the team bus before commencing with further victory celebrations back at the team hotel.Over the course of the last three weeks, there were a series of far-fetched fantasies most people would never have believed possible a generation ago. A sold-out cricket stadium to watch a domestic franchise league in Texas, let alone anywhere else in the USA, would have seemed more miraculous than turning water into wine. But a globetrotting, multi-millionaire, best-T20-bowler-in-the-world legspinner from Afghanistan being showered with pure unadulterated love by American sports fans on US soil would have simply been far too good to be true. At Sunday night’s Major League Cricket final in Grand Prairie, Texas, seeing was believing.
