The Afghan national cricket team has been on a winning streak, defeating England and Pakistan, among others. Afghan expatriates and those living in their home nation have cheered wildly at the stunning success of their team, providing a much-needed boost of optimism amidst a generally sad situation for the Afghani people.

Let’s start with a confession from the outset – I find cricket incredibly boring. My fellow Australians – yes, I was born here regardless of what impression my foreign name gives you – are excited by the sport. I always cheer for the underdog, and the Afghan win, while not in a sport I enjoy, was something to behold. If Afghanistan plays Australia in the cricket, I will be cheering enthusiastically for Afghanistan. I am happy when smaller and/or poorer nations win in sport.

The Australian cricket team has been a resilient, successful team; they can afford to lose to a smaller nation. In fact, whenever the Australians squared off against the West Indies in the 1980s, I vociferously cheered for the West Indies.

The ‘Windies’ team, as any cricketing fan will tell you, were a formidable sporting superpower in the 80s. Their long running success has ensured their players a spot as outsize heroes in the Caribbean. The team was drawn from the various nations and dependencies that constitute the region.

Back in 1976, the West Indies triumphed in cricket over their old adversary England. The effect was electrifying; no longer would the Caribbean nations be dismissed as ‘calypso cricketers.’ The West Indian team trounced their opponents, multiple times. Witnessing a smaller nation – well, a Caribbean island region in this case – emphatically defeating their larger, more organised opponents is wonderful, and supersedes nationalist parochialism.

Morocco, Spain and transcending national boundaries

In December 2022, Morocco defeated Spain in a tense penalty shootout, advancing to the quarterfinals of the FIFA World Cup. Not only was this the first time that an Arab team had advanced so far in the football, the fact that they defeated Spain, the former colonial power in Morocco, added extra resonance to the result.

Displays of euphoria, and mass celebrations of Morocco’s unprecedented advance in the football, was not restricted to Moroccan nationals. True, Moroccan people cheered in the streets, waving their flag. But they also hoisted the Palestinian flag, and the latter became a noticeable fixture in the celebrations of Morocco’s win across the Arab world.

Ben Lewis, writing in SBS news, explained that Palestinian nationalism is the common platform of solidarity and standard bearer of pan-Arab nationalism. Defeating Spain in the soccer was not just a sporting triumph, but an important signal to the world that Morocco, and Arab nationalism by extension, was a potent force in the region and could not be ignored.

The Moroccan government, headed by long term monarch Mohammed VI, is one of a number of Arab regimes that has signed normalisation treaties with Israel. The Abraham Accords, as this series of bilateral agreements is known, signalled a defeat for Palestinian nationalism. The Arab governments, such as Morocco, indicated to the world that they are prepared to abandon demands for Palestinian statehood in exchange for diplomatic recognition and economic cooperation with Israel.

Sporting diplomacy

The Moroccan football team, and their Arab supporters, waved the Palestinian flag not just as part of their jubilant celebrations. They were also repudiating the open normalisation of ties with the Zionist state by their respective governments. To be sure, Morocco has maintained secretive, cooperative contacts with Tel Aviv for decades. Tel Aviv and Rabat have coordinated their efforts in combating revolutionary and pan-Arab nationalist sentiments when it suited their mutual interests.

There is another important observation to be made here; sporting diplomacy is not the exclusive preserve of oppressed or marginalised peoples. Sport events have long been used as a vehicle to promote colonialist and ultranationalist regimes. It is no secret that Hindu supremacist Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, during his trips to Australia, the US and other countries, uses cricket as leverage in building relationships, thus softening his hardened Hindu supremacist message with a sporting gloss.

Mike Meehall Wood and Nakul M Pande write in Jacobin that India’s politicians are never far from the cricket. PM Modi knows this, and he knows that cricket, through the transnational network that was the British empire, became a common sporting and cultural interest binding England’s former colonies with the English overlords. Cultural and sporting exports served to build ties with England’s far flung possessions.

While India’s diaspora community cannot vote in India’s elections, they can certainly build bridges between India and their host nations. Pro-BJP sentiment in the Indian diasporic communities is a useful platform for international support for the Hindutva supremacist project. Cricket is the perfect instrument to solidify ties between the homeland and the expatriates.

Rather than turning expatriate communities into partisans of an ethnosupremacist project, lets briefly look at a counter example. A massive and sustained multicultural community campaign is behind the stunning success of Luton Town football club. The club, languishing in relegation for at least thirty years, finally returned to the premier league.

Obviously, the players on the team deserve all the credit for their amazing turnaround. However, we would be remiss to forget a crucial dimension of their success – the solid community engagement by Luton town people, coming from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, combining to save their football club from complete dissolution.

It was the Luton town football fans who saved their club. The combination of a collective ethos, and treating each ethnic community equitably, resulted in a new form of cooperative management of Luton club. The first in the premier league to be a living wage employer, Luton survived and flourished despite concerted efforts by venture capital to dissolve it through mergers with other clubs.

Why do I cheer for Afghanistan in the cricket? Because ethnic or national pride as a basis for sporting enthusiasm is fine, but too narrow a perspective. Australians are supposed to be renowned for cheering the underdog. Encouraging the longshot to win is deeply embedded in the Australian folklore and sense of history – at least that is what we tell ourselves.

So, in that spirit, I cheer for the smaller nations – Jamaica in the athletics, Palestinians at the Olympics, and today, Afghanis in the cricket. National pride is all well and good, but I would like to see a world where interethnic solidarity is the norm.