‘Cricket is everything’: Adnan Miakhel’s England dreams alive as asylum granted

On the dusty backstreets of Afghanistan, Adnan Miakhel played cricket with whatever he could find. He bowled for hours with a tennis ball and fashioned a bat out of a tree branch. His obsession with the sport grew and grew.

“Cricket to me is everything,” he said later. “Somebody said to me: what’s your favourite hobby? Cricket. What do you want to do in the future? Cricket. Everything cricket, cricket, cricket.”

Now Miakhel, 16, is expected to play for the youth team at Lancashire, one of the best clubs in the UK, having been granted asylum by the government after an appeal by the former England star Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff.

Miakhel arrived in Britain as an unaccompanied minor in April 2021, after hiding himself in the back of a lorry in Calais following a terrifying five-month journey through Iran, Turkey and Greece.

He was 14 when his mother arranged for him to be smuggled out of Afghanistan to escape the clutches of local militia fighters. His brother had been killed in the violence after his father made him join the insurgency.

The softly spoken teenager, whose only English when he arrived was “cricket” and “police”, has become something of a local celebrity in his new home town of Chorley, Lancashire, after stunning Flintoff with his cricketing ability in the BBC series Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams.

Miakhel’s talent was obvious from the moment he walked nervously into the Preston college gym where Flintoff’s team were training.

Miakhel had applied for asylum but his claim has been in limbo since last summer. On Friday, after a further appeal by the former England international, his foster parents, Elaine Jefferson, 71, and Barry Brocklehurst, 81, were told that his asylum claim had been granted.

“We all just