Leading Edge: Play stops war? Good luck with that

What must Afghanistan’s players have thought when they happened on seemingly pristine Sophia Gardens? Could it possibly be on the same planet as their country, the target of plunder and pillage and all manner of uninvited mayhem?

Sunday Times

TELFORD VICE in Cardiff

IF you walked into the restaurant attached to South Africa’s nondescript team hotel in Cardiff on Thursday, you might have seen Faf du Plessis and Rassie van der Dussen buried up to their eyebrows in talk.

Their foreheads were angled towards each other, their eyes locked and loaded, their chins dipped. A pot of tea, and cups, nestled below the conversation.

Du Plessis did most of the talking, Van der Dussen most of the listening. To hear Afrikaans burbling through the muzak was an unexpected comfort on the greyest of grey British afternoons.

Although you couldn’t see the sun shining, you could hear it in their voices; the African sun, which is so far in every sense from the awkwardness of this coldhearted place.

What were Du Plessis and Van der Dussen talking about? That’s difficult to say. But South Africans watching this World Cup from afar should know that the players’ seriousness about their team’s situation should not be doubted.

Still, however deep the discussion might have delved, it is unlikely to have veered in the direction of war. Whatever they were talking about, it wasn’t dying and destruction.

Du Plessis wasn’t quite 10 years old when South Africa’s hard won democracy was achieved. Van der Dussen is five years younger. Both are white, so even though they grew up during apartheid’s death throes they would never have been touched by its horrors — which for all their awfulness were not as bad as war.

The old man of the squad, Imran Tahir, might be able to tell the rest something about war, having been alive for six of the many that have involved Pakistan.

Tahir was born in Lahore months before the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, a long and brutal conflict into which his country was dragged.

Afghanistan was where George W Bush cynically decided to show how small his manhood was in the wake of the terror attacks in New York and at the Pentagon on September 11, 2001.

The consequences of that stupidity are still being felt. The murderous Taliban have mounted two attacks in Afghanistan this year already and have been the subject, along with ISIS-K, of attacks by Afghan state forces as recently as March. Civilians have been victims every time, of course.

And Afghanistan were South Africa’s opponents in a World Cup match at Sophia Gardens in Cardiff on Saturday.

That last statement does not sit at all comfortably on this page, a feeling only added to by the setting for the match. The ground hugs the west bank of the beautiful Taff River with the outrageously green and lush Bute Park unfurling apparently forever to the east, an unending bolt of the finest felt tossed into the world.

What must Afghanistan’s players have thought when they happened on this seemingly pristine place? Could it possibly be on the same planet as their country, which for centuries has been the target of plunder and pillage and all manner of uninvited mayhem?

Two of the Afghans — wicketkeeper Ikram Alikhil and off-spinner Mujeeb Ur Rahman — are teenagers, three are not yet 25, and six have reached 30. And none of them knows what it feels like to live in a country free of war. Neither do their parents nor their children. This is as close as it gets for them.

They are the lucky ones who have earned the right to be part of civilisation, as per global cricket’s interpretation, for these six weeks. Then it’s back to reality with them. Play will be suspended, war will resume. War stops play? Not quite. Play stops war? Good luck with that.

This World Cup has lurched from one drama of self-obsession to the next. From the fallout of Kagiso Rabada telling us, honestly, what he thinks of Virat Kohli to MS Dhoni having to be ordered to remove a symbol of war from, of all things, his wicketkeeping gloves, to the spiralling silliness over exactly what and when AB de Villiers — the retired, ineligible AB de Villiers, mind — spoke to whom about unretiring.

And in the midst of all that irrelevance are people who know war, and will know it again.