On Monday, Afghanistan Cricket Board sacked Asghar Afghan from leadership duties across all formats of the game.
The decision to remove Asghar has been taken for controversial reasons, with the ACB nearly accusing him of deliberately losing the Test match against Zimbabwe in Abu Dhabi in early March.
“The decision to remove Asghar Afghan from captaincy was taken based on an investigation conducted by ACB’s Investigative committee which concluded that some of Afghan’s decisions as the captain of the team resulted in Afghanistan’s loss to Zimbabwe in the first Test of the series between both sides in Abu Dhabi in March,”
the board said in a media release.
Afghanistan had a disastrous outing versus Zimbabwe in Abu Dhabi, making scores of just 131 and 135 in their ten-wicket defeat in a Test match embarrassingly lost inside two days.
At the time, Asghar had put the loss down to “visa issues”, resulting in Afghanistan going into the match with a weakened side.
And though Afghanistan bounced back strongly on a more friendly surface in the next Test, with Asghar leading from the front via a knock of 164 in his team’s six-wicket victory, the defeat in the first Test became the lasting memory from the short series and reflected Afghanistan’s problems.
Having removed Asghar, the ACB has once again opted for a split-captaincy model, appointing Hashmatullah Shahidi as the country’s new Test and ODI captain and making Rahmat Shah as his deputy.
The ACB stated that the decision to appoint the new T20I skipper “will be taken soon”. The board, however, confirmed wrist-spinner Rashid Khan as the new vice-captain for the shortest format.
Afghanistan’s biggest challenge will be to ensure that the sudden changes at the helm don’t affect their preparations for their forthcoming international fixtures, including the T20 World Cup.
When Asghar was previously sacked from captaincy ahead of the 2019 World Cup, Afghanistan couldn’t cope up with the change immediately. They lost all of their fixtures at the quadrennial event in the UK and finished bottom of the point table, albeit while running a few teams close.
