English cricket’s uneasy relationship with Afghanistan boiled over again this week after former England batter Mark Butcher accused the England and Wales Cricket Board of hypocrisy over its handling of no-objection certificates for the Afghanistan Premier League. Speaking on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast, Butcher said the board was applying “a breathtaking double standard” by appearing willing to clear English players to take part in the Twenty20 league while continuing to refuse bilateral fixtures against the Afghanistan men’s team.
A Podcast Comment With Board-Level Consequences
Butcher’s remarks landed at an awkward moment for the ECB. According to Wisden’s reporting, the board had been widely expected to grant NOCs to its contracted players wanting to join the Afghanistan Premier League draft, but has since been reported to be reconsidering its position entirely. Butcher argued that flip-flopping punishes the players caught in the middle: “You either don’t want them to go, or you’re happy for them to go,” he said, adding that it is “a difficult moral argument” to wave players off with a certificate and then publicly question whether they should have gone at all.
The League at the Centre of the Storm
The competition in question is the Afghanistan Premier League, a Twenty20 tournament whose player draft was pushed back from September 27 to October 24, according to Wisden. Several England internationals, including Ollie Pope and Moeen Ali, had reportedly registered interest in the draft, a reminder of how thoroughly England’s contracted players are now woven into the global T20 league circuit that runs alongside, and often against, the international calendar. For a tournament based in Afghanistan itself, the political sensitivity is obviously sharper than for a league in the UAE or South Africa, which is precisely what has put the ECB in a bind.
A Bilateral Boycott That Makes This Awkward
The ECB has refused to schedule bilateral series against Afghanistan’s men’s team because of the Taliban government’s treatment of women and girls, including the effective banning of women’s cricket in the country. Yet Afghanistan remains a Full Member of the International Cricket Council, meaning England still face the team at ICC events such as World Cups. Butcher’s point was that this selective boycott — no bilateral cricket, but full participation everywhere else, including now potentially clearing players to earn money inside Afghanistan’s domestic structure — is difficult to defend as a coherent moral position. He added that players’ financial incentives to join such leagues shouldn’t be held against them individually, comparing it to people who take jobs in countries with governments they don’t endorse simply to earn a living. The responsibility, he said, lies with the “governing bodies” that “operate at a double standard which is quite breathtaking around the whole issue,” not with individual cricketers.
Precedent: The ECB’s Last NOC Crackdown
This isn’t the first time the ECB has tried to tighten its grip on NOCs. Roughly two years ago, the board attempted a broader crackdown on clearances for England players to join overseas T20 leagues and ran into significant resistance from the playing group, who view the leagues as a legitimate and often lucrative part of a modern cricket career. That episode left the ECB wary of appearing to restrict player earnings without a clearly articulated reason, a dynamic that is shaping the current, more cautious approach to Afghanistan. It is also notable that the ECB has gone out of its way to support the Afghan women’s cause through other channels: this past English summer, the exiled Afghanistan women’s team toured England, playing a match at Wormsley, attending the final of the Women’s T20 World Cup, and meeting King Charles — a gesture widely read as solidarity with displaced Afghan women cricketers even as the men’s bilateral boycott remains in place.
Richard Thompson Pushes Back
Not everyone at the ECB shares the instinct to intervene. Chair Richard Thompson has publicly cautioned against restricting players from taking up overseas T20 contracts, telling reporters that “you can’t restrain somebody from working somewhere unless you’ve got good reason.” Asked specifically about the Afghanistan Premier League, Thompson said the matter “hasn’t come to us yet” in a formal sense, but that the board would “have to consider that very carefully” once it does — a notably more measured tone than the one Butcher accused the institution of adopting.
What Happens Next
With the postponed APL draft now scheduled for October 24, the ECB has only a few weeks to settle on a public position before its players are formally due to be assigned to franchises. A reversal on previously expected NOCs would almost certainly reignite the same player-relations tension that followed the board’s crackdown attempt two years ago, while a straightforward approval would leave Butcher’s “double standard” charge largely unanswered. Either way, the episode has become a useful proxy for a larger, unresolved question in world cricket: whether boycotting bilateral cricket with a Full Member nation on human-rights grounds is compatible with that same nation’s domestic league quietly absorbing international stars. Richard Thompson’s board will have to give an answer, one way or the other, within weeks rather than months.
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