Thousands of kilometers away, Mel Jones was sitting in an Australian hotel in quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic when he received a message from an Indian journalist and asked him if he had heard the situation of the Afghan credenty team.
The players were looking forward to the Afghan Cricks Board to help him after the Taliban took over but they did not accept anything.
They were only afraid of the radical Islamic group.
The journalist involves Jones with one of the players and he asked whether there was anything he could do to help. The player replied that all his friends and the staff of the rear room needed to leave Afghanistan.
Jones, who won two World Cups with Australia, then passed through his communications and brought volunteers into the stadium, including his friend Emma Steepls, who previously worked for Creete Victoria, and Dr. Catherine Urdo, who helped vacate Afghan women’s footballers.
The construction of a strict network of people who can help, including on the ground in Afghanistan, organized visas and transportation to eventually leave the country, mainly in Pakistan and then on military flights to Dubai. From there, by plane or Canberra flew to trade flights supported by the Australian government.
“I don’t think I understand the greatness of the things we will do then,” Staipls said. “We told them that we might not be able to save everyone.
“For me, it was coordinating to be mocked as a migrant immigration service. It is the registration of visa documents, passport documents and attempts to transfer money to Afghanistan to girls to buy passports.
“It was six weeks of gathering information from family members. We were trying to obtain identity cards, but we had only this extraordinary developer that explained the details of everyone in detail.
“It’s “really active” but “nothing that Google translation could not fix it.
“Now we laugh at the language barrier, I had different names such as ‘beat’ and some other strange things,” Stay Ples said.
“Everything happened so fast for them that I don’t think they had time to think about what they had to leave.
The 52-year-old, who is now working as a cricket broadcaster, said there were moments that it was unclear that the task would be successful.
“We had to fight the system when everyone always said it was impossible. Things were happening minutes,” Jones said.
“Without a misleading voice, there were moments they felt in a Jason Bournette movie,” he said, adding that he would try to comment on televisions and send a message to a player who fights to find the right car that takes him to a safe place.
“He couldn’t find the car and went up for different people and I had to warn you you couldn’t do it (for safety reasons), but then I had another commentary so I had to say ‘Don’t do anything until I come back!’
“That was the terrible part for me, they just made sure they made the right decision.