I was hooked by Afghan training to their national cricket centre opening shots: three concrete nets and bowling machine. Taj Malik, their proud coach gestures toward its players and said: "They resemble my Australian cricket team."
The scene was shot at a time where Adam Gilchrist, Matthew Hayden and Brett Lee did not yet retired, and wide green remains most powerful symbol of cricket.
Since then, the two teams have been travelling in opposite directions - Australia cutting back on service to stop, while Afghanistan pushed forward on the express.
The film follows Malik and his men from March 2008 (when they were still classified alongside Japan and Botswana) of global ttwweennttyy this year in the Caribbean. Good production values are a bit creaky, but it's a hell of a thread.
Fire on Babylon, the latest film by cricket, I saw, depicts activists West of Clive Lloyd as a team driven by a sense of nationalism. In Out Of The Ashes, a similar sense of injustice animates the Afghan people. They are protesting against any associations with their homeland with endless conflict and religious fundamentalism, the heroin trade.
Cricket is different, a chance to interact peacefully with the outside world. Since the early 1990s, when the civil war led many Afghans in Pakistan refugee camps was widespread from village to village. It now allows the nation to talk of the nation, using the common vocabulary of sport.
"We must show the world that the Afghanistan is a great country," explains their captain, Mangal Nowruz with a speaker drag. Later, he explains the filmmakers that "we like all this leads to the credit of our nation."
Is there an index here to ensure that Australians have lost? During much of the 20th century, they were those looking for respect and recognition. They are the ones who thought belittled and patronised by the mother country crossed the ocean. And they are the ones who sought to show themselves on the playground.
"No Australian had written lost paradise", wrote the Australian novelist Thomas Kenneally. "But Don Bradman scored a hundred before lunch to the Lord."
Indeed, most of the cultural historians would admit that Bradman supremacy over the English launchers no longer has anything to sense the Australia national identity.
Far from major Australian cricketers were excluded and prospered on this fact. Think of Victor Trumper, "Prince of the drummers" and his modest origins, son of a Bootmaker. From Glenn McGrath, who is never happy for the hunting of pigs on his farm in the outback. Brothers Waugh and their roots in the difficult suburbs of Bankstown.
Then watch Michael Clarke and Shane Watson, the new stars of the Australian team. They are younger greybeards curved like Ricky Ponting and Simon Katich six years only, but with blond hair, fast cars and their friends dummy, they might come from a different planet.
These men are the product of a newly safe Australia. Australia announced its maturity with the best games ever staged and has now a thriving economy and a thriving cultural scene. Is - this whole surprise is that, according to recent studies, sport is dragged in the list of priorities of the Australian way?
The Australian cricketers are convinced to beat England once more in the future. They could y next week. But as a sporting nation, the Australia is entering middle age. It no longer has the fervor that inspired the great Caribbean teams, which - according to the terms of a coach - Afghanistan "messianic quality."
"These guys are closer to national heroes that you can get without being a major war," says Matthew Fleming, the former versatile in England, who has coached in Kabul. "" "" They perceive as having a role wider than cricket, and that has helped fuel this extraordinary increase place ranking. »
Afghanistan continue to improve and blood new talent. Just last weekend, while English fans were happy nights vigils staging, they were beating in Scotland in the Intercontinental Cup. At this rate, it will not be long before our two trains colliding in a test match. If nothing else, it would be a suite of cracking.
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