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Langton Green Cricket Club in Kent

A clutch of Afghans have come to the rescue for Langton Green Cricket Club in Kent, reports Nick Greenslade

A convincing win on a glorious late September day was a fitting way for Langton Green Cricket Club to conclude this season. Victories in all but two games, no matches cancelled because of player shortages – this ranked among the best of summers.

Adam Hollioake had a scary time in Afghanistan

It also represented a remarkable turnaround. By 2015, the club was fighting for its future as playing numbers began to dwindle. “Sometimes we would only have seven players available and have to call games off,” says Martin Russell, captain and stalwart of the club for more than 30 years. “It was the worst I’ve experienced in my time. Another couple of years of that and we could have been facing oblivion. I’ve seen it happen to other clubs.”

Salvation arrived in an unexpected form – an influx of players from Afghanistan and from Peshawar, just over the border in Pakistan. Langton Green is a village three miles outside Tunbridge Wells in Kent. The team in which I played for 10 years was almost universally white – a reflection of the area. An ethnic melting pot it most certainly is not.

Assimilation has not been simple. The post-match beer is an integral part of village cricket. There were some summers when I must have drunk more pints than I scored runs. For players of Islamic faith, this is obviously not on their agenda. There is a section on the England and Wales Cricket Board which offers advice on ‘Understanding religious faiths at your club’, which was clearly written with this in mind.

Despite this advice, there are some areas of the Midlands and Yorkshire where an ‘apartheid’ system has broken out: Asian players, put off by the beery culture, breaking off to form their own teams. The demands of Ramadan – fasting between sunrise and sunset in the summer – create issues too.

Langton has largely overcome these tensions. On the pitch, our new cohort have been committed, talented – their approach is very much of the T20 kind – and vocal. Sometimes, too vocal. There was an ugly scene earlier in the summer when an umpire told two of them to “just shut up” after they had carried on chattering about an appeal that had been rejected. The umpire had a valid point but would he have spoken so brusquely if he had been talking to two white guys?