Afg vs Ind - T20I series - Naveen-ul-Haq is back, fierce and unbothered

Naveen-ul-Haq is a bothered 19-year-old. He is on a plane back home from Christchurch, having just captained Afghanistan to a World Cup semi-final. “What went right, what didn’t go right? How did we lose?” he asks himself. Afghanistan had reached the Under-19 knockouts for the first time. There, they had slid to a six-wicket loss to Australia.

Naveen has a lot of time on his hands: it is a 17-hour flight. “You think one day, you will represent Afghanistan, and become a captain. But did I enjoy it?” he asks himself. “And the straight answer came to me: no, I haven’t enjoyed any of it. Every day, I was stressing out for each game, how to play, how to win… Am I going to be selected for the national team based on my Under-19 performances?”

As a young cricketer, Naveen used to lie awake until 3 am, sometimes later, anxious about his performance before a match day. “I didn’t enjoy my first seven or eight years of my career, even the first couple of years, in 2017 and 2018, when I made my debut for the national team.” And then, in the emotional depths of that 17-hour flight, Naveen tells himself: “Don’t think too much, and just enjoy the cricket while you play.”

When he steps off the plane, he feels the relief in his body. “The heaviness was less.”

It is 2026. Naveen hasn’t played for Afghanistan in two years, or any professional cricket since December 2025. A week before the three-match T20I series against India, he posts a carousel of himself on Instagram, gazing into the distance and training for his return to the side. The post has a curious caption: “Unbothered”.

“Yeah, I captioned and posted it,” he says. “When a player gets injured, the fan base has a short memory span, so the player’s abilities, his performance, the team selection, everything is questioned. So, that’s why I captioned it ‘unbothered’. Everyone has their own opinion… A player’s job is to go to the ground and perform.”

Naveen was born in Kabul at the cusp of the new millennium. As a child he fled to Pakistan with his family. He played tape-ball cricket there, starting off as a batter before he switched over to fast bowling. When he returned to Afghanistan, he picked up a leather ball for the first time. He was fast-tracked into the Under-16 squad, then eventually became the captain for the 2018 Under-19 World Cup. He had already debuted for the senior side in an ODI against Bangladesh, in 2016, as a 17-year-old.

A decade later, Naveen is a T20 globetrotter. But his career has been on pause; a stress injury in his right shoulder ruled him out of this year’s T20 World Cup. Did he ever slip into despair during the nine months in rehab? “It is lonely. It’s a very tough time for a person,” he says.

“The stress facture healed itself within eight to ten weeks. But I had a second surgery for labrum repair. And the shoulder capsule had to be tightened, so that happened too. For the first six weeks of rehab in the UK, I had to sit while sleeping.”

So Naveen could only look on while Afghanistan crashed to a group-stage exit at the World Cup. For him, their double-super-over loss to South Africa was particularly heartbreaking to watch. “I was sitting in a sling in my place in the UK,” he says. “I had the feeling that if I was there for the team, maybe I could have done something different in the death overs. This was on my mind throughout rehab. That I don’t want to put myself back in a situation like this again. If I am out there, I can do something.”

Naveen is, after all, a death-overs specialist, though he has expanded his new-ball skills to become a fast bowler who can operate at any stage of a T20 game. He delivers with an accentuated front-on action, and bowls with his arm beyond the perpendicular. His repertoire of cutters makes him an especially testing prospect on pitches like those that were in use at the 2024 T20 World Cup, in the USA and the West Indies. There he starred in Afghanistan’s run to the semi-finals with 13 wickets at an average of 12.30, and an economy of just 6.00.

While the recent months away from cricket were bleak, they gave Naveen a rare chance to catch up with old faces. “I spent a lot of time with my family and friends, which I was not able to for the last three or four years,” he says. “I got the time to reasses my whole body, and how I bowl. Not just my shoulder.”

Naveen had spent those three or four years appearing in all the major T20 leagues: from the IPL, PSL and BBL, to ILT20, MLC and the BPL, and then some. But his prolific T20 output has not been without hiccups. Along with Fazalhaq Farooqi and Mujeeb Ur Rahman, he was sanctioned by the Afghanistan Cricket Board in 2024 after they turned down central contracts to play franchise cricket. They were initially hit with a two-year ban from T20 leagues, and their NOCs were revoked. Soon after, the trio came to an understanding with the board. Naveen flew out to South Africa to play in the SA20 as scheduled.

The fast bowler has also drawn social-media ire – and a hoard of trolls – with his on-field altercations. In 2020, he had a run-in with Mohammad Amir in the LPL, with their quarrel continuing even when they shook hands after the game. Then most infamously, in 2023, he had his mango-themed run-in with Virat Kohli in the IPL while playing for Lucknow Super Giants. “The type of cricket I grew up playing, and I got success from, I will never change,” he says.

“If I play with passion, then that passion makes me perform 10% better. Even when I used to play tape-ball cricket, I played with passion… If I remove this, I’m sure my cricket performances will also go down. Anyway, off the field, I am [180] degrees opposite to what you see on the field.”

Owing to his recurring injuries, Naveen retired from ODI cricket after the 2023 World Cup: in one of his final games, he witnessed that double century from Glenn Maxwell, which effectively knocked Afghanistan out of the competition. “My decision [to retire] was based on prevention of injuries,” he says, citing his knee troubles. “But to be honest, what I see of ODI cricket nowadays, I feel sad; it’s not the one-day cricket I grew up watching. I would not sleep at night and watch all the matches, whether in Australia or New Zealand.”

He still consumes a lot of cricket, though. He spent part of this weekend watching the third Test between England and Pakistan. “It still has that excitement,” he says. Now, his focus is on his T20I comeback against India.

Afghanistan have beaten every Test-playing nation in international cricket barring India. Though this is a bilateral series in a non-World-Cup year, Naveen’s comeback arrives against the backdrop of this final frontier. “If you see the [ODI] World Cups in 2015, or 2019, we won just a single game or so. But then you see how we played in the 2023 World Cup. In this generation, you will see nine or ten players who have been playing for Afghanistan since the Under-19s together, since 2018. Those players are now in the national team, playing franchise cricket all over.”

In white-ball cricket, Afghanistan are among the best in the world. And despite Naveen’s prolonged absence from the Afghanistan side, he is the face of its fast-bowling cohort. Still, the intense routines of a fast bowler, the globe-trotting, the injuries: all of it makes for a hard life. But Naveen wants more. “We have to play as much cricket as we can, but one day, it’s all going to end. Everyone has to leave, and we’re going to miss it as a cricketer… We have to play, get on the ground, feel the pressure.”

Naveen has come a long way since those early years in embracing this pressure. If he could time-travel, what would he want to hear from his future self? “That I have given everything whilst I was playing,” he says. “That I haven’t held back anything. I haven’t left anything in my body, and I have enjoyed every bit of it after 2018.”

Naveen felt lighter when he stepped off the 17-hour flight from Christchurch. Since then, he has been through heartbreak, rehab and on-field brouhahas. But he is back now. He will be unbothered.

Abhijato Sensarma is a sub-editor at Cricinfo

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