‘Cricket is everything’: Adnan Miakhel’s England dreams alive as asylum granted

Adnan was 14 when his mother arranged for him to be smuggled out of Afghanistan. Photograph: family handout

On the dusty backstreets of Afghanistan, Adnan Miakhel played cricket with whatever he could find. He bowled for hours with a tennis ball and fashioned a bat out of a tree branch. His obsession with the sport grew and grew.

“Cricket to me is everything,” he said later. “Somebody said to me: what’s your favourite hobby? Cricket. What do you want to do in the future? Cricket. Everything cricket, cricket, cricket.”