The short white-ball trip that was meant to pit Afghanistan against Sri Lanka in the United Arab Emirates from 13-25 March is, for now, off the table. With the fighting in West Asia spilling over into air routes and day-to-day logistics, both boards have privately accepted that staging six matches in Sharjah and Dubai is no longer workable.
Neither the Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB) nor Sri Lanka Cricket (SLC) has yet pushed out a formal statement, but officials on both sides have conceded, in the usual guarded way, that “the risk is simply too high”. Shifting the games to another neutral venue has been floated, though the calendar, travel restrictions and late notice make that solution unlikely.
The itinerary looked straightforward enough a fortnight ago: three T20Is in Sharjah on 13, 15 and 17 March, followed by ODIs in Dubai on 20, 22 and 25 March. It would also have doubled as a first outing for Afghanistan under new captain Ibrahim Zadran, who has taken the white-ball reins from Rashid Khan after their early World Cup exit.
Instead, the series joins a growing list of fixtures disrupted by the regional crisis. Six ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup League 2 matches in Nepal, featuring Oman, UAE and the hosts, were scrubbed last week. Teams exiting the men’s T20 World Cup have encountered similar headaches: West Indies and South Africa spent days stuck in Kolkata until air corridors finally opened on Sunday for a Tuesday departure.
The immediate financial hit for both boards is manageable, insiders insist, but the cricketing cost is harder to pin down. Afghanistan need game-time under a new skipper; Sri Lanka are still piecing together a post-World-Cup plan of their own. Rescheduling later in the year sounds tidy on paper yet squeezes an already busy international roster.
For now, coaches and players can only wait. The hope is that a quieter window appears soon, though no one is putting a date on it – a reminder that, every so often, cricket is forced to take its place in a queue behind larger, grimmer realities.
