No cuts to Afghanistan Cricket Board funding planned by ICC

The Afghanistan Cricket Board will not see any of its funding from the International Cricket Council cut or diverted to its exiled women’s cricketers.

An initiative to support the displaced Afghan players was announced by the ICC following its board meeting in Zimbabwe last weekend.

However, as reported by ESPN Cricinfo, cricket’s global governing body will not reduce or siphon off money earmarked for the ACB, even though part of the criteria for full membership of the ICC is to support women’s cricket.

The ICC will support the Afghan women through a separate funding mechanism, while the ACB will continue to receive a payment believed to be in the region of £13m per year.

All of that funding will go towards men’s cricket in Afghanistan, with women’s sport outlawed in the country since the Taliban returned to power in 2021.

The ACB is the only full ICC member not to field a women’s team.

Instead, Afghanistan’s women’s cricketers will be funded by the ICC in conjunction with the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), Cricket Australia and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

An Afghanistan Women’s XI played an exhibition match in Melbourne in January and want to be recognised as a refugee team.

But the ICC is understood to have acknowledged that the prospect of Afghanistan’s women playing official international matches in the near future is a distant one as it would need to be sanctioned by the ACB.

Afghanistan’s women have been promised a robust high-performance programme offering “advanced coaching, world-class facilities and tailored mentorship” which the ICC hopes will “help them reach their full potential”.

Afghanistan’s men’s team have retained their Test status, reached the semi-finals of last year’s T20 World Cup and participated in the Champions Trophy earlier this year.