Zalmay Daftani grimaces as a batsman from his team’s local arch-rivals thwacks a ball, sending it flying over the boundary line of the cricket pitch on the Malmö beachfront, bringing an end to the six-ball ‘over’. 

“Well, this over went horribly wrong,” he sighs, before returning to telling his side of the story of the crisis in Swedish cricket.

“Yes, there are some regrets,” Daftani says of the fateful extra annual general meeting or EGM he called at the Swedish Cricket Association five years ago, which installed him as chair, “but back then, things were really going downhill.” 

Tariq Zuwak, the chair he unseated had, he claims, made the measure necessary by failing to replace the association’s Swedish General Secretary and her staff for months and months after they resigned, meaning the association lost the funding earmarked for their salaries, as well as mismanaging finances in other ways. 

It wasn’t just the money. Zuwak and his board took over the role that had been played by the professional, paid ‘office’, which had been led by a Swede.  

“Suddenly all the operation work the office used to do was managed by the board,” Daftani complains. “And I have always said that when you have people playing cricket in the board, there will always be conflicts of interest in fixture scheduling, funds to clubs, all those kinds of things.”

Despite this, Shahzeb Choudhry, the British Pakistani who had brought cricket into the Swedish Sports Federation as chair in 2016, begged Daftani not to call the meeting. 

“In Swedish society that’s considered the last of the last resorts, right. Once you open that sort of loophole, there’s going to be trouble,” he told The Local. 

He turned out to be right. 

Zuwak – like Daftani a successful professional of Afghan origin – lay low for a year after Daftani replaced him. But from 2021 calls began coming in for a series of retaliatory extra AGMs, backed by many of the same clubs that had only the year before come forward to unseat him, including one person – Sanjay Kumar – who was on Daftani’s board. 

“I received an email from all these clubs where they apologised to me and my board members and said they wanted me in my board to continue the good work we had done before,” Zuwak told The Local of the run up to the first 2021 EGM. 

The first two were not signed by Zuwak – although Daftani and others suspected him of involvement. The third one, which was successful, was signed by him, and in November 2022, he was voted back in as chair. 

It wasn’t long before the problems started again. In May the next year, the Swedish Sports Federation — whose chairman Björn Eriksson had the previous year given a stern warning to the federation’s members not to call another extra AGM  — withdrew all funding from the Swedish Cricket Federation, citing “serious deviations from the values of sport and deviations from the member association’s obligations regarding auditors and auditing”.

Zuwak’s board then had to make all the association’s paid employees redundant, once again putting them in direct charge of league fixtures and funding decisions.

This April, the conflict made national news, with a mini-documentary broadcast on Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT. 

Before the Swedish Sports Federation took its decision to suspend the Swedish Cricket Federation, it commissioned a report from the accounting firm EY.

While it did not name names or take sides in the dispute, the report accused the cricket federation of perverting the democratic structure of cricket by micromanaging the league structure, fixtures and the selection of the national team, and in particular of holding excessive extraordinary AGMs, ahead of which favours to clubs and club chairs were promised in exchange for votes.

“We believe that the association’s management and much of the rest of its activities are permeated by a poor understanding of how associational democracy should work,” the report stated. “Amendments to the statutes and extraordinary annual general meetings are used as a weapon to counteract people with dissenting views.”

Below is a timeline made by EY, showing how Zuwak’s first board (styrelse A), was ousted by a no-confidence motion at at extraordinary AGM (misstroende), to be replaced by Daftani’s board (styrelse B), after which Zuwak mounted three more no-confidence motions, eventually deposing the board of Daftani’s replacement Dinesh Adhikari’s board (styrelse C) in 2022, to form the current board (styrelse D).

Extraordinary growth 

Observing the passion on display at Limhamnsfältet, the two cricket pitches by the Malmö seafront, it’s hard to see Swedish cricket as a sport in crisis.

On one pitch, Daftani’s team Ariana CC is playing a knock-out match against its local arch-rivals Ariana AKIF. “If we win, we go ahead; if they win, they go ahead. You can’t get better than that,” Daftani explains. 

On the other, Malmöhus Cricket Club is taking on Lund Cricket Club.  

The teams’ profiles illustrate just how and why this sport, imported to Sweden only in the early 1990s, has exploded over the last decade, the number of clubs soaring from 13 to 87 and the number of players from 600 to over 8,000.

Malmöhus CC was one of the first cricket clubs in Sweden. It was founded in 1993 by a Swede, Eric Folker, who had picked up the cricket bug in the UK. At that time, Sweden had only a handful of teams, with Brits, Australians and South Africans playing a big role.

Now Malmö CC and Lund CC, like most clubs, are dominated by the Indian IT programmers who have streamed into Sweden over the past decade.  

“We’re all IT consultants here,” says Pawan Singh, one of Malmöhus’s players, as he watches his teammates from the comfort of a deckchair. “This guy’s from Dubai but his parents are from India, there are a few guys from South India. I’m from North India.” 

Ariana CC and Ariana AKIF, on the other hand, have largely been built on the back of the influx of cricket-mad young Afghans who came during the 2015 refugee crisis. 

They are a formidable force, Singh concedes. “We IT geeks aren’t as quick as they are!”

‘Very positive news coming soon’

When The Local spoke to Zuwak, he was upbeat about the sport’s future, saying he believed the suspension from the Swedish Sports Confederation (RF) would end and funding be fully returned in September. 

“I really believe that there will be some very positive news coming soon and I’m also positive about RF’s decision in September,” he said. “Because we have done our very, very best to convince RF that we are moving in the right direction.”

He said the International Cricket Council had already ended the federation’s suspension, as it was now compliant with the ICC’s constitution after putting in place a Code of Conduct.

The Swedish Sports Confederation had at the start of June delivered the 600,000 kronor in project support promised in January, ahead of a decision in September on whether to declare the cricket association once again eligible for funding. In the autumn, he said he intended to hire a new General Secretary. 

Several cricketers The Local spoke to, however, expressed scepticism that Zuwak’s new board was capable of putting the sport back on track, accusing him of buying clubs’ votes by proposing a new league structure which nearly doubled the number of teams in the Allsvenskan top league, a proposal which won votes from teams in the lower Superettan league. 

“The people who are in charge now are the people that caused the problem by calling for extra AGMs every five minutes,” a player at one of Stockholm’s leading clubs complained to The Local. 

They also point out that this year’s national Swedish team was selected behind closed doors with no trials held and Akmal Zuwak, Tariq Zuwak’s younger brother, on the squad. 

Even one of those who supported Zuwak in his extraordinary AGM said he now regretted it, explaining that when he was given a job helping arrange the league in 2023, he had been asked to punish a club who had opposed the new chairman.

“I was specifically told, with this team, you know, ‘send them all on away matches to Karlskrona’, and this and that, and I said, ‘forget it, I’m not gonna do that’,” he said. “I was surprised that somebody has that much adversity to say ‘let’s carry out revenge’ after all the things that have happened.”

Origins of the crisis

The way Zuwak tells it, the bad blood began in the run-up to the 2017 AGM, when he managed to get voted in as Treasurer against the wishes of Choudhry and Daftani (who was then deputy chairman), by, among other things, accusing the board of diverting money to the national team that could have gone to the clubs. 

Zuwak also lobbied for a rule banning board members and people working for the cricket federation’s office from playing in the national team, a rule which directly targeted both Choudhry himself and Azam Khalil, one of the top players on the national team, who was employed by the office in 2017 as a Project Leader helping Afghan child asylum seekers get into cricket. 

“The irritation started from there,” Zuwak told The Local. “From then on, whatever I said, it was ‘oh no. He’s against us. He’s not a good guy’. I had the position of Treasurer, but I was totally ignored.”

Those on the board and in the office at the time claim that to get elected, Zuwak had misleadingly told clubs that RF funds were going to the national team which could have gone to them when in reality it was mostly earmarked by the Sports Confederation for youth and women’s cricket. 

As Treasurer, they claim, Zuwak sought to gain information he could leak to the clubs, damaging trust. “He made the life of the General Secretary hell by asking for so many things and interfering all the time in office work,” one anonymous person said.  

By the time of the next AGM, Zuwak’s relationship to the rest of the board had broken down entirely. 

“I said, ‘you do what you want. I know that the clubs don’t like the way the SCF works today. I will go my own way and I will run for the chairmanship’,” Zuwak remembers saying. “And then they said, ‘OK, let’s see who wins’.” 

When Zuwak then did win and became Chairman, he says, the then General Secretary Ulrika Lingslunde, her deputy, and Khalil all immediately went on sick leave until Lingslunde handed in a resignation letter several months later. 

In this letter, which was sent to member clubs, she decried the “lies and disinformation,” about the office that had come from the new board, the “extremely disrespectful tone” used towards them, and the “promises of services and favours” made to get Zuwak elected. 

“In various forums and email threads, wrong statements were made about us at the office, that we are unnecessary, greedy, spending the federation’s money on leisure trips, promoting only some clubs, and yes, just that we are racists,” she wrote.

Zalmay Daftani, former chair of the Swedish Cricket Federation. Photo: Richard Orange

‘He punished us’

Daftani is not necessarily immune to acting out of his own interest. 

According to Zaki Pashtun, a former member of Ariana CC, Daftani’s team, a strong motive for ousting Zuwak back in 2019 had been to secure a place for the team in the top league. The original Ariana club had been taken over by Malmö’s Afghan association, AKIF, and as Daftani had originally used their organisation number to register the team, there wasn’t much he could do about it.

So, he started a new team from scratch, leaving AKIF with the old club’s league position. 

“We started from zero and the chairman of the other club was mates with the chair of the Swedish Cricket Federation [Zuwak], so every time we played matches we used to get away games – like, 80 percent of our matches were away games – and that meant really long journeys,” Pashtun told The Local. “That’s why Zalmay [Daftani] wanted a position on the SCF board. He wanted this injustice to stop.” 

Zuwak also accuses Daftani and Adhikari of withholding information about the prestigious European Cricket Series (ECS) until after they were voted in as a board, and then rushing through a team selection process that benefitted their own supporters. 

“He punished us by not letting us into the ECS as revenge for his team starting from the lowest division,” he told The Local.

He accuses Khalil of using his influence in the office to get players from his own Alby Zalmi team into the national team. 

Finally, he accuses the previous board of using legalistic methods to hang on for months as the interim board after the EGM that unseated them, like calling the final meeting to appoint the new board in Umeå in the far north of Sweden, purely to inconvenience Zuwak. 

‘Successful work went to waste in a very short time’ 

Many cricketers The Local spoke to argued that Daftani’s board, and its successor headed by IKEA executive Dinesh Adhikari, had been moving in the right direction, putting in place processes and shifting responsibility for operational league decisions to a salaried General Secretary, who was a Swedish national and drawn from outside the cricket world.

These two boards had also channeled funding into youth cricket and women’s cricket, helping make the sport less reliant on adult professionals, and so more like other sports in Sweden. 

Daftani’s board had started well, the person who worked in the office said, appointing the accountancy firm PwC in 2019 to improve the situation, while Adhikari’s board, which was voted in at an ordinary AGM, had then tried to transfer all league decisions to the office to end the problem of board members being pressured to favour specific teams.

This changed almost as soon as Zuwak’s board took over in 2022. PwC said it no longer wanted to be the federation’s auditor and the board then delayed the appointment of an authorised auditor even after it became part of the Swedish Sports Confederation’s action plan, only opting to appoint HQV Stockholm the following November. 

In the run-up to the first cricket season it was to manage, the new board also took back control over league structure and management from the General Secretary and Competition Manager, putting the new structure to a vote of member clubs over the head of the office.  

Daftani complained that the new structure benefited four clubs — Indiska CC, Seaside CC, Karlskrona Zalmi, and Trident — all of whose members sat on the new board.

“Basically, the current board chose to stop relegation and promoted the clubs in the T20 (benefitting themselves…) where the relegation was due, and implemented relegation in longer format where there was no relegation or promotion due based on last year (again, benefitting themselves),” Daftani wrote on Facebook.

This led to conflict with Monica Söderberg, the club’s then General Secretary, who had previously spent six years helping manage Sweden’s basketball association.

While the previous board, Söderberg wrote in an open letter after she was dismissed, had created “an efficient system for carrying out the work”, and and “optimised organisational plan”, after the new board took over “all of this successful work went to waste in a very short time”.

“I and other staff have had to stand up to considerable pressure and threats, at the same time as fighting a hopeless fight to follow all the decisions, regulations, and guidelines set by the cricket association, the sports federation, the ICC and even Swedish law,” she wrote.

Zuwak says that Söderberg was seeking revenge after being sacked because under the previous board she had signed a contract with a new cricket coach and Director of Cricket Qasim Ali, which the new board thought was far too expensive and argued went beyond her remit as General Secretary. 

“Never in Swedish history, have we signed any contract with anyone for this amount of money!” Zuwak told The Local, claiming the total contract was worth 2.4 million kronor. 

‘There are always going to be unhappy people’

While Choudhry, the chair who brought Swedish cricket into the Swedish Sports Confederation, is also sceptical about Zuwak’s suitability, he is reluctant to pin all the blame on him, arguing that a lot of the problems stem back to a mistake he himself made when he was chair back in 2016.

“Germany, like Sweden, received a lot of refugees and that helped raise the profile of the game and what Germany did was make those people join existing sports clubs — you know, like Hammarby in Stockholm, who have football, rugby, and other sports. I think we should have done that. Instead of letting people start new clubs from scratch, they could have just joined existing sports clubs, because then they would have gained from the administration help and stadgar [club rules].”

Instead, Sweden saw dozens of new clubs registered which consisted of little more than a single 11-man team, with no children’s cricket or women’s cricket, and often with an explicitly ethnic name, such as Stockholm Mumbai Indians, Indiska CC, or Ariana, which is the name for Afghanistan in Persian and Dari. 

Cricket clubs, which when Choudhry arrived in Sweden tended to have members from a mix of cricket-playing nations, all the way from Britain to Bangladesh, now often include players from just one country. This uncontrolled growth in the number of teams lay behind a lot of the conflict, he said. 

“What happened was that, if you’re only there to play league cricket on the weekends, if there are only 20 grounds in the country, and there’s nearly 100 teams, when you make a schedule, there’s always going to be unhappy people,” Choudhry argues. “‘We can’t have this umpire’ for example, or ‘you can’t give me too many away games’.”

As Sweden is such a big country, many players — especially Afghans or Bangladeshis who tend to earn less than the Indians — lack the time or the money to travel 500km every weekend in the summer. So if someone promises to give a particular team an easy set of home and away fixtures in exchange for an AGM vote, it’s tempting to vote for them. 

In addition, some of the smaller teams lack any members proficient in Swedish — the language of the Swedish Cricket Federation’s documentation and meetings — meaning they often simply give powers of attorney to others to vote on their behalf at AGMs, regardless of what is discussed.

Choudhry argues that Daftani and Adhikari’s board had not been perfect. It may have been a mistake, he suggested, to keep Khalil employed in the office at the same time as he headed both the successful Alby Zalmi team and played in the national team, as it created a potential conflict of interest which didn’t look good when in one year, seven out of 11 players in the Swedish national team came from his club. 

“I think the sticking point for a lot of clubs was Azam Khalil. Fantastic guy. We’ve been good friends for years, and I’ve always said to him that you should just go and work in a different sport, but he’s just crazy about cricket, but people who didn’t like him, used it [the conflict of interest] against him.”

Several people The Local spoke to, including Choudhry, Daftani and Zuwak, suggested there was a culture clash between Swedish club culture, with its rules, regulations, systems, and search for consensus, and the more relationship-based culture of Indians, Paksitanis and Afghans. 

“I’m basically part of that community, I’m an Asian person,” Choudhry said. “But there’s just a huge lack of trust. And you see that even on the pitch. As soon as an umpire makes the wrong decision, people start talking, ‘oh, he’s he’s from this team. So that’s why he’s like doing this’.”

This is despite the fact that many of the key players have lived in Sweden for years and are well integrated, with well-paid, highly skilled jobs. Choudhry, for example, is laboratory manager for a major pharmaceutical company. 

Daftani, who moved to Sweden from Saudi Arabia when he was 16 and studied at the prestigious KTH Royal Institute of Technology, complains that many of those playing cricket have never absorbed the Swedish way of doing things. 

“I usually say some people who come to Sweden are physically here but mentally not here,” he said. “They still have the same mindset for dealing with things as back home.”

“At some of the clubs the mentality is that if their match umpire is not at the ground, they will call the chairman [of the Swedish Cricket Federation]. ‘My umpire is not here’, and if you don’t answer or help them, right then and there on the spot, they’re like ‘OK, this guy did not answer my call. Maybe we can find someone else to vote for’.”

Zuwak agrees that this is the case. “We need to educate these people, you need to make them understand that the Chairman’s responsibility is not assigning an umpire.” 

Waiting for September’s verdict 

Today, with the cricket season well underway, the unofficial Cricket homepage has changed from a being a forum for conflict to a place where teams boast of their victories, and batsmen and bowlers of their feats on the pitch.

Toralf Nilsson, the Vice Chairman of the Swedish Sports Confederation, told The Local that a final decision still hasn’t been taken on whether to declare the federation eligible for renewed funding in September. 

“We have seen progress, but it has been slow, and in my mind, they started a little bit too late following the decision to withhold the grant. It took a while until they really started to work on the action plan,” he said.

But at the last AGM in March, the board was reelected in a relatively standard way, and elements of the action plan, such as an anti-corruption code, got voted through. 

“The reason why we have so far not given them chance to get back the funding is that we still want to see the effects of these actions. Because it’s not only to put things on paper, it has to be implemented,” Nilsson said. 

One thing is for certain, at least. Cricket in Sweden is not going away.

But without full funding, there is little chance of developing youth cricket, of drawing in ethnic Swedes, or of working with local municipalities to address the shortage of pitches which is at the root of the conflicts. Sending a team to the Olympics in 2032, let alone in 2028, looks unlikely. 

At the pitch by Malmö’s seafront, Singh gestures around him. “Just look at this set-up. We’ve got not toilets, nowhere to change. If it rains, there’s no protection anywhere. At the end of the season, we’ll know whether they [the board] have done anything, if they’re going to get the money back.” 

Daftani, meanwhile, says he’s given up trying to battle Zuwak’s board on social media or at AGMs. 

“Believe me, if I started coming out with facts and evidence about what’s happening on a high level today, they would still be having issues with the Sports Confederation,” he claims. “But I’m keeping quiet because why should I destroy the future of Swedish cricket?”

“What’s going to happen is that these people will get tired in a year or two anyway. At some point, they will leave, and then maybe some good people will come.”