ABSTRACT
The game of cricket certainly has a history in the United States, having been taken there, once again by British army officers, in the eighteenth century and adopted by American gentlemen of leisure. Cricket has been played in Afghanistan since the nineteenth century but its flourishing there is said to be product of occupation by the United States and the Soviet Union and the subsequent civil war between the army and supporters of the left-wing Afghan government and the Islamist Taliban. Cricket’s governing bodies have faced problems in maintaining the existing scope of international cricket competition, never mind extending it. These difficulties, adapting the now-famous terms set out by C. L. R. James lie, it will be suggested, both within and beyond the boundary. Cricket, it was thought, could be politically important in building a secular modern/Westernised hegemony to counter the Islamised severity of the Taliban and the equally brutal traditional authority of the nation’s warlords.
