{"id":492353,"date":"2026-03-24T09:37:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T09:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/492353\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T09:37:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T09:37:09","slug":"ireland-v-afghanistan-irish-players-can-opt-out-of-series-says-graeme-west","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/492353\/","title":{"rendered":"Ireland v Afghanistan: Irish players can opt out of series, says Graeme West"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cricket Ireland chief executive Sarah Keane said on Friday that the decision to host Afghanistan this summer came with some “moral discomfort” given the plight of women in the country.<\/p>\n

Keane, who started in the role <\/a>this month, is the first permanent female chief executive of an International Cricket Council (ICC) full member nation.<\/p>\n

W0hether to proceed with the series was the sole item discussed at a “robust” 90-minute Cricket Ireland board meeting last week before the series was given the green light, albeit not unanimously.<\/p>\n

“I want to acknowledge upfront the moral discomfort that I think we all sit with around this decision, and how the regime treats women in particular,” she added. <\/p>\n

The new CEO also explained the reasons behind the decision to go ahead with the August series.<\/p>\n

“Forty percent of our board are women – the overall decision was that we would play Afghanistan and take our obligations as a full member very seriously.<\/p>\n

“But I think the main reason also was that people felt very strongly that if we don’t [play the series] the issue kind of goes away, whereas we need to be talking about the displaced Afghan women’s team.<\/p>\n

“They’ve also been invited to [play in] Ireland but I don’t think it will happen this year due to scheduling. <\/p>\n

“It’s incumbent on us to make sure we look to what we can do and it stays an issue for us and we do highlight their plight.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cricket Ireland chief executive Sarah Keane said on Friday that the decision to host Afghanistan this summer came…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":492354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-492353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=492353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/492353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/492354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=492353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=492353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=492353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}