Boycott Afghanistan But Cash Their Cheques — The ECB's Greatest Act of Hypocrisy

Let us get the timeline straight, because it is genuinely difficult to believe a professional sporting organisation managed to contradict itself this completely in the span of a few weeks.

Step one: The ECB refuse to schedule any bilateral cricket against Afghanistan. The reason, stated publicly and repeatedly by ECB chairman Richard Thompson, is the "appalling oppression" of women and girls under the Taliban regime. England have never played a bilateral series against Afghanistan since the Taliban's return to power. Only Australia shares that stance among Full Members. The ECB have called for a "coordinated international response by the cricketing community."

Step two: Eight English cricketers — including two with active ECB central contracts — register for the draft of the Afghanistan Premier League, a five-team T20 franchise tournament launching in December 2026 in the UAE, run by the Afghanistan Cricket Board. The ECB signals it will grant them No Objection Certificates.

Step three: After a wave of backlash from MPs, women's rights campaigners, and anyone with a functioning memory, the ECB suddenly discovers that maybe this needs to be "considered very carefully."

That is not governance. That is a man who set fire to a bridge and then tried to drive across it.

Thompson's argument, stripped of its diplomatic padding, is this: boycotting bilateral cricket is an ECB policy choice. Blocking players from franchise leagues is a legal restraint on trade. The two are different.

On paper, he is probably right. English employment law makes it genuinely difficult for a governing body to prevent a player from earning a living overseas. The ECB don't bar players from the IPL, the Big Bash, the PSL, or the Hundred. Singling out the APL could open them to legal challenge.

But here is where the argument collapses: the ECB's entire moral position on Afghanistan is that the ACB operates under a regime that oppresses women. If that oppression is severe enough to cancel all bilateral cricket — severe enough for Thompson himself to call it "appalling" — then it is severe enough to justify the "good reason" Thompson says the law requires. You cannot simultaneously argue that the ACB is too morally compromised to play against but perfectly fine to do business with.

Unless, of course, the moral objection was never really about morality at all. It was about not wanting to host a series nobody would buy tickets for.

Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi has been the loudest voice in British politics on this issue — and she is not going away. She was the driving force behind the campaign to boycott England's Champions Trophy 2025 match against Afghanistan. She lost that fight. England played the match. But the debate she started didn't die, and now she has caught the ECB in a contradiction they cannot explain.

Her message to the players who registered for the APL draft has been blunt: "Think of the consequences."

And she has a point that the ECB cannot refute with employment law. If the reason England don't play Afghanistan is that the Taliban's treatment of women is unconscionable, then every English cricketer who takes an APL contract is personally choosing to enrich the same system the ECB claims to stand against. The money flows through the ACB. The ACB operates under the Taliban government. Income tax reaches the state. This is not a complicated chain of reasoning.

The same argument, incidentally, was made by Sunil Gavaskar earlier this year when Indian-owned Sunrisers Leeds signed Pakistan's Abrar Ahmed for The Hundred. Gavaskar took it further — and more controversially — by linking player payments to military expenditure. But the underlying logic is identical: you cannot separate the money from the regime.

Even setting aside the political minefield, the APL is not exactly a tournament that screams institutional credibility. The original edition in 2018 was so riddled with corruption that the ICC opened ten separate investigations involving twenty suspects. The league was subsequently abandoned. Payment disputes followed. The brand was toxic.

Now, eight years later, it is being revived — in the UAE, not Afghanistan — with an ICC sanction that was granted only recently. The draft has already been postponed once, from September 27 to October 24. The ECB's most recent language — Thompson's "when it comes to us, we will have to consider that very carefully" — suggests the board may be hoping the whole thing collapses on its own, sparing them the embarrassment of either a grant or a refusal.

That is not leadership. That is hoping the problem goes away before you have to solve it.

Here is the question the ECB will eventually have to face, because Thompson's careful non-answers won't hold forever: Is your objection to Afghanistan cricket moral, or commercial?

If it is moral — if you genuinely believe the ACB's existence under the Taliban is a stain on cricket that England must not legitimise — then block the NOCs. Accept the legal risk. Explain to Ollie Pope that his employer's principles mean more than his franchise payday. That is a defensible position. It might even be an admirable one.

If it is commercial — if the real reason England don't play Afghanistan bilaterals is that nobody would watch and nobody would pay — then say so. Drop the moral posturing. Stop invoking women's rights as a shield for scheduling decisions. And let the players take whatever contracts they want, because you were never really standing for anything.

What you cannot do — what nobody can do with a straight face — is claim moral authority with one hand and wave through franchise registrations with the other. The ECB tried it. They got caught. And the fact that their chairman's best defence is "restraint of trade" tells you everything about how seriously they took the principle in the first place.