THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

It's not the security implications of holding a game in Afghanistan that has been the problem (they haven't actually played a competitive game in Kabul since 2003, with only a couple of friendlies -- against Pakistan in 2013, and Palestine in 2018 -- staged at home. Their 'home' games have mostly taken place in Tajikistan or Qatar). The main issue has been money -- as a knock-on effect of the crisis at home, the federation's bank account was frozen, meaning they simply weren't able to fly their various players to where they needed to be.

This game is only taking place because of help from FIFA, although the hope is that the banking issues will be solved by the time of the Asian Cup qualifiers next year, which have been pushed back to June 2022 due to pandemic-related complications.

Dastgir was born in Kabul in 1989. He and his family fled to escape the civil war that erupted after the USSR left the country that year, seeking refuge first in Pakistan, then India, before settling in the Netherlands when he was 11. His father returned home, to the northern Panjshir area, to help rebuild the country after the Americans arrived in 2001.

But Dastgir remained in the Netherlands, at first as a player with Eredivisie side VVV Venlo. Then a knee injury curtailed his career, so he instead threw himself into coaching. He has worked with NEC Nijmegen and his current 'day job' is as head coach of VV Duno, in the fifth tier of Dutch football.

He was assistant to Otto Pfister, the itinerant German manager who, among many other appointments, took Cameroon and Ghana to Africa Cup of Nations finals and was in charge of the Afghanistan team in 2017 and 2018. When Pfister departed, he recommended Dastgir for the job. It's a fairly extraordinary story, and will be the subject of a book by the Dutch journalist Ivo Roodbergen, to be released next year.

"When I got the chance," Dastgir says, "I said to the president, 'I will do something different. I will not just play against small countries to make the people happy. I want to develop the team, so we need to play strong teams. Maybe we will lose for two years all our games'. And so we started playing against countries which were 50 or 80 places higher in the rankings."

That plan was held back a little by the pandemic, but results have been respectable under Dastgir: they came fourth in their World Cup qualifying group but acquitted themselves well with a win and three draws from the eight games, and have only lost once in their five matches this year after not playing at all in 2020. When those Asian Cup qualifiers resume next year, Dastgir's aim is to make it to the finals for the first time in the country's history.

The results are only half the point, though.

There was no football in Afghanistan during the Taliban's first rule: it banned most sports, so between 1995 and 2002, the national team didn't play at all.

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