Afghanistan in Test Cricket

Origins and the road to Test status

Afghanistan were admitted to Test cricket in June 2017 and played their first match a year later against India, at Bengaluru. The result was an innings-and-262-run loss inside two days. It was the culmination of a two-decade climb through the ICC associate tiers by a national side that had first played in the World Cricket League Division Five in 2008 and had reached the ODI World Cup by 2015.

The nine Tests

Afghanistan have played nine Tests in seven years: one in 2018, three in 2019, two in 2021, one in 2023 and two in 2024. Three of them have been wins. The first came in March 2019 at Dehradun - the country’s neutral-venue home ground for much of the last decade - a seven-wicket chase over Ireland the first of Afghanistan’s three Tests that year. The largest - a 224-run win over Bangladesh at Chittagong in September 2019 - was the away win that suggested a settled Test attack was arriving. The third - a six-wicket win over Zimbabwe at Abu Dhabi in March 2021 - remains the most recent.

Signature players

Rashid Khan - 5 Tests, 34 wickets at 22.35. The leg-spinner whose ODI and T20 wickets dwarf his Test caps only because the format has offered him so little of the schedule; his 45.1 balls per wicket in Tests is comparable to any specialist spinner of the current era.

Rahmat Shah - 9 Tests, 578 runs at 32.11. The scorer of Afghanistan’s first Test century and the anchor every one of the modern middle orders has been arranged around.

Home and away

Afghanistan have not yet played a Test in Afghanistan itself. Every match on the record is either at a designated neutral home ground (Dehradun and Lucknow in India, Abu Dhabi in the UAE) or at a genuine away venue. The home-away split is a formality on this scale.

Rivalries

Ireland at 2 Tests is the head-to-head fixture Afghanistan hold: 1 win to 1 loss. Bangladesh at 2 (1 win to 1) and Zimbabwe at 2 (1 to 1) are the two other completed head-to-head rivalries. Against India, West Indies and Sri Lanka Afghanistan have one Test each and no wins. The rivalry pattern reflects the calendar the country has been given rather than any pattern on the field.

What CricArcade shows

The Follow-On lets you pick an Afghanistan XI from the modern side - Rashid’s attack, Rahmat and Ibrahim in the middle order, Nabi as the all-rounder - and play a five-day Test at any of the venues that appear here. The engine reads real careers rather than a single rating, so Rashid bowls the length he actually bowls, Rahmat anchors the way he does, and a home Test at Dehradun plays differently from an away one at Bengaluru. The results in this piece are the real ones; the game is the choice of which of them to try to repeat.