South Africa’s sports activities minister Gayton McKenzie has urged the Proteas to boycott their 2025 ICC Champions Trophy sport in opposition to Afghanistan as a result of Taliban authorities’s ban on girls’s sports activities and disbanding the ladies’s cricket group because it got here again to energy in 2021. Temba Bavuma-led South Africa will start their 2025 Champions Trophy marketing campaign by way of a Group B conflict in opposition to Afghanistan on the Nationwide Stadium in Karachi, Pakistan on February 21. The 2 groups are in Group B alongside England and Australia.
“To be clear, the ICC has accepted the precept of equality in sport, and that member nations ought to be creating each female and male gamers. This doesn’t occur within the case of Afghanistan, suggesting that political interference within the administration of sport is being tolerated there. In the identical breath, Sri Lanka was banned in 2023 for political interference.
“I’m conscious that the ICC, like most worldwide sporting mom our bodies, professes to not tolerate political interference within the administration of sport, regardless of its apparent inconsistency with Afghanistan. It’s not for me because the Sports activities Minister to make the ultimate resolution on whether or not South Africa ought to honour cricketing fixtures in opposition to Afghanistan.
“If it was my resolution, then it actually wouldn’t occur. As a person who comes from a race that was not allowed equal entry to sporting alternatives throughout Apartheid, it might be hypocritical and immoral to look the opposite manner in the present day when the identical is being carried out in the direction of girls wherever on this planet.
“Cricket South Africa, the federations of different nations and the ICC should think twice in regards to the message the game of cricket needs to ship the world, and particularly the ladies in sports activities. I hope that the consciences of all these concerned in cricket, together with the supporters, gamers and directors, will take a agency stand in solidarity with the ladies of Afghanistan,” mentioned McKenzie in an announcement on his ‘X’ account on Thursday.
Beforehand, a letter by Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, with practically 160 UK members of the parliament signing it, known as for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) to boycott their match in opposition to Afghanistan, to be performed in Lahore on February 26.
Although ECB chair Richard Gould rejected requires the boycott of the sport, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer additionally known as on the ICC to observe its personal guidelines, which make it necessary for any full member that fails to area males’s and girls’s groups in worldwide cricket to be suspended.
(Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
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