AFAfghanistan

Country history

Afghanistan's cricket history is unusually compressed: the game was largely learned by Afghans living as refugees in Pakistan during and after the Soviet-Afghan war, who brought it home after 2001. The Afghanistan Cricket Board moved through the ICC's development pathway with remarkable speed, and on 22 June 2017 Afghanistan was awarded Full Member (Test) status alongside Ireland. Their inaugural Test was played against India at M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru, in June 2018, a heavy defeat by an innings and 262 runs -- but their first Test win followed astonishingly quickly, against Ireland in March 2019, only their second Test match, making them the fourth team in history (after Australia, England and Pakistan) to win one of their first two Tests.

Afghanistan's white-ball cricket has produced the team's biggest global moments. At the 2023 Cricket World Cup in India, Afghanistan recorded historic wins over England, Pakistan and Sri Lanka -- their first-ever World Cup victories over each -- and the team reached the semi-final of the 2024 T20 World Cup, a landmark run for a nation that had been a Full Member for barely seven years. Rashid Khan, one of the leading leg-spinners in the world across all formats, has been the team's talismanic figure since the mid-2010s, alongside veteran all-rounder Mohammad Nabi and Asghar Afghan, who captained the side through its elevation to Test status and its early Test matches.

Sources

• Wikipedia
• ESPNcricinfo