MCC to play first-ever match against Afghanistan

Date released: 20 March 2006

Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) today announced that it will be playing, later this week, its first-ever match against Afghanistan.

In this pioneering and historic fixture, MCC will be captained by Mike Gatting (right) - the former England captain. The match will be played, on Thursday, at the Police Ground in Mumbai, at the end of MCC's current tour of India.

Mike Gatting said: “I am delighted to have the opportunity to lead MCC in this historic game against Afghanistan. Cricket has developed rapidly in the country over the last few years. MCC is keen to assist this process - as it is in all emerging cricket-playing nations.”

Cricket's popularity in Afghanistan has surged since many of the refugees who fled from the country in the early 1980s, after the Soviet invasion, started to return from Pakistan - where they saw the game and started to play and follow it. In the last decade, the membership of the Afghanistan Cricket Federation has grown more than twenty-fold - from 500 to 12,000 members (source: Prospect Magazine).

The Afghan team will be flying into Delhi before transferring to Mumbai by train. Its travel is being sponsored by MCC; the British Embassy in Kabul and the World Cricket Academy in Mumbai have also played key roles in facilitating this match.

Explaining the background to the fixture, MCC's President, Robin Marlar (right), said: “This match is the culmination of many months of hard work. It all started several years ago when an MCC Member, Mark Scrase-Dickens, raised the issue of Afghan cricket at a Club AGM. Subsequently, at the Asian Cricket Council in London last summer, I was asked to help and we have been so pleased with the contributions made by the World Cricket Academy in Mumbai and, of course, the authorities in Afghanistan who have been swift to seize the opportunity. This is merely the beginning: because of the intensity of interest in the game in Afghanistan, there is no reason why that country should not progress year upon year with Bangladesh - the newest of the Test-playing nations - as the example to follow.”

The MCC team will be selected from:

- Mike Gatting (captain)
- Tony Matharu
- Bryan Jones
- Sam Anderson
- Stephen Brogan
- Paul Carroll
- Matthew Friedlander
- Chinmay Gupte
- Michael Jarrett
- Richard Kettleborough
- Tom Leeming
- Danny Miller
- Sameer Patel
- Tim Smith
- David Snellgrove

In 2002, MCC joined forces with Slazenger and the Royal Air Force to equip an Afghan XI and an international peacekeepers’ team for a match in Kabul.

The countries to be toured by MCC teams later this year include China, Botswana and Zambia.