Band-e-Amir Region Wins Ahmad Shah Abdali First Class Competitions 2021

The Ahmad Shah Abdali Regional First Class Tournament, this year’s biggest domestic event, started on November 8 in Kandahar Province and ended with the Band-e-Amir region crowned as champions, going past the AMO region comprehensively by 7 wickets in the final.

Ahmad Shah Abdali First Class Competitions 2021 featured 5 regional teams, and after 5 rounds of matches, the top two of them (AMO with 66 & BAR with 54 points out of 4 matches each) qualified to the grand final of the event.

At the final match, the AMO region won the toss and elected to bat first. The openers struggled to get going and were restricted by some excellent bowling from Nijat Masoud and Hamza Hotak. Juma Gul was the only batter to cross the 50-run mark and managed to make a fighting 84. Among others, Ibrahim scored 24 while Asadullah Matani made 19 runs. For BAR, Hamza Hotak bagged 6, while Nijat Masoud picked 2 wickets.

BAR region started their first inning well, but later on, lost wickets at regular intervals and were bundled out for 193, trailing by 10 runs. Zia Parwani & Sediqullah Atal made 44 and 33 runs respectively. The right-arm quick, M. Saleem bowled very well and picked 5 wickets for the Amo region. Zohaib Khan, the left-arm spinner, also contributed with 4 wickets to help his team, take a 10 run lead.

Despite having already 10 runs on the board, the AMO region still could not capitalize on in the 2nd inning and added only 117 more runs to their tally to put a total of a 127-run target on the board. The skipper, Nasir Jamal fought till the end with 62*, but the rest of the batters could not resist the fast and furious bowling spell of Nijat Masoud as the latter bagged 7/37 to single-handedly confront his team to a comfortable chase in the 4th inning.

Band-e-Amir region, banking on the unbeaten 51 & 39 runs from Afsar Zazai and Zia Parwani respectively, chased down the total by 7 wickets to win the 4th edition of the Ahmad Shah Abdali FC competitions. Zohaib Khan took 2 while Abdul Rahman scalped only one wicket for the Amo region. Nijat Masoud was awarded as the man of the final match with his 9/84 in the match.

Riaz Hassan, who had made a mammoth sum of 636 runs in 9 innings at 79.5, including 3 hundreds and a half-century, was adjudged as the best batter of the tournament. Zohaib Khan with 32 wickets in 10 innings, including a 10-fer & 2 fifers, was awarded as the leading wicket-taker of the tournament. Jamshid Khan, on the other hand, was awarded as the best player of the tournament, after making 237 runs and picking 13 wickets in the tournament. Khalil Gurbaz was the 4th player to win an award in the final ceremony, who was awarded as the Emerging Player of the tournament with 13 wickets in his debut event.

Mirwais Ashraf, interim chairman of the Afghanistan Cricket Board, who was present at the final ceremony, congratulated the Band-e-Amir region on their glory and reflected these competitions as “effective” in the development of domestic cricket as well as for the preparation of the players for the higher level cricket. He did also assure the players that the ACB aims at arranging more domestic events and are working to provide more facilities to the domestic cricket players.

This is fair to note that this edition of the competitions saw a 25% increment in the match fees of the players which proved to be very handy for the players. This edition was the 4th overall of the competitions, where the current champions Band-e-Amir region were the winners of the first two editions in 2017 & 2018 while the Speenghar region was declared as the top team of the 2019 edition.