Afghanistan

The road to the 2018 ICC World Cup Qualifier title, and the semi-final at the 2023 ODI World Cup that followed it, gave Afghan cricket its first taste of being taken seriously rather than treated as a curiosity. Neither came easily: the qualifier was won years before Full Member status arrived, and the semi-final run, finishing sixth overall, came against sides with decades more Test experience.

Full Member status followed on 22 June 2017, six years after the team had been an Associate side and sixteen after it first joined the ICC as an Affiliate. That progression, unusually fast by the sport's standards, sits oddly against a simpler fact: the team has never been able to play a home match at home. Security concerns in Afghanistan pushed the side abroad, first to grounds in Greater Noida and Dehradun in India, and now to Sharjah, where the Sharjah Cricket Stadium, with its 16,000 seats, has become the closest thing Afghanistan has to a fortress.

The rivalry that carries the most weight is with Pakistan, sharpened by history and culture rather than by anything invented for television; the one with Bangladesh gets called a sibling rivalry, two young cricketing nations testing themselves against each other. Momentum has kept building since Sharjah became home: a semi-final at the 2024 T20 World Cup, another at the 2025 Champions Trophy.

Through all of it, Rashid Khan has been the name attached to Afghanistan's rise, but it is Mohammad Nabi who carries the longer story — a former captain, and still the side's leading run-scorer and wicket-taker in One-Day Internationals, a rare double that says as much about the team's early years as about the player himself.