Akcel United Kabul vs Balkh Zwanan: APL 2026 head to head

APL head-to-head record

There is no APL record between these clubs yet. Both start the 2026 season with a blank page: played 0, won 0. Results, the win–loss count and the scorecards will be added here once they play in APL T20 2026. The 2018 clubs from the same cities were different franchises, so their results are not carried over — and neither club inherits anything from 2018.

The 2018 final: same cities, different clubs

Anyone who watched the first APL will feel a tug of recognition here. The only final the league has played was between the two cities in this fixture. On 21 October 2018, at Sharjah Cricket Stadium, Kabul Zwanan won the toss and batted first, making 132 for 9; Javed Ahmadi’s 32 off 19 was the highest score. Qais Ahmad took 5 for 18 and was player of the match, Chris Gayle made 56 off 34, and Balkh Legends reached 138 for 6 in 18.1 overs to win by four wickets with 11 balls left. Rashid Khan, who captained Kabul that night, was player of the series.

The league meeting between the same cities a week earlier was wilder still: on 14 October, Balkh Legends posted 244 for 6, the highest total of the tournament, in a match in which Hazratullah Zazai hit six sixes in an over. None of it counts here. Balkh Legends and Kabul Zwanan were different clubs, and their results stay with them. What survives is a pair of threads: Qais Ahmad, the player of that final, is in Balkh Zwanan’s squad for 2026, picked in the Supplementary round; and Zazai, who made 322 runs for Kabul Zwanan in 2018, is in Akcel’s squad. The cities have history. The clubs start at 0–0.

Where the squads differ

Both squads were built at the same draft, on 3 November in Dubai, and both hold 19 players. The shapes are different. Akcel leans on left-arm pace and wrist spin: Fazalhaq Farooqi, who took 17 wickets at the 2024 T20 World Cup, leads the attack, and Mujeeb Ur Rahman, taken with the first Gold pick, gives Omarzai a second spin option. Six of Akcel’s 19 are overseas players, including West Indies keeper-batter Johnson Charles, the Platinum pick, and South Africa’s Imran Tahir in Silver.

Balkh built around England’s Moeen Ali, the second pick of the Platinum round, and Allah Mohammad Ghazanfar, whose 6 for 26 against Bangladesh in November 2024 made him the third-youngest bowler to take a six-wicket haul in one-day internationals. Five of Balkh’s 19 are overseas players. Balkh also used its Wildcard on Abdullah Ahmadzai in Gold, and added Qais Ahmad, the man who won the 2018 final with the ball, in the Supplementary round.

Key battles to watch

The captains set the tone. Azmatullah Omarzai, the ICC Men’s ODI Cricketer of the Year for 2024, is a fast-medium all-rounder who has made 149 not out in one-day cricket and a T20 international hundred in October 2026. Ibrahim Zadran is Afghanistan’s T20 international captain and an opener whose 177 against England in the 2025 Champions Trophy is the highest individual score in that tournament’s history. Omarzai is also the only one of the two with an APL match behind him: he made his T20 debut with Paktia Panthers in 2018.

The bowling match-up is just as sharp. Farooqi’s left-arm pace against Moeen, an England all-rounder with a Test hat-trick and two World Cup titles, is the kind of contest that decides a powerplay. And Ghazanfar’s mystery spin against Zazai, who scored 322 runs for Kabul Zwanan in 2018, is the other one to circle.

Coaches and mentors

The dugouts are as recognisable as the squads. Akcel have Shane McDermott as head coach and Nikhil Chopra as mentor; Balkh have Mickey Arthur as head coach and Tillakaratne Dilshan as mentor. Both leadership groups were set at the leaders’ draft, and both stayed in place when two other captaincies were swapped on 3 November. The mentor list for the season also includes Irfan Pathan at Kandahar and Mark Boucher and Waqar Younis elsewhere — every dugout has a name the crowd will know.

When do they play each other?

The first meeting has no date yet. The fixture list had not been published, and neither side’s dates, opponents or grounds are known. What is known: the season opens on 27 December 2026 in the UAE, with the first ball at 5:30 PM Afghanistan time (5:00 PM Dubai time), and the league has advertised 24 matches — twenty league games, then a knockout. This page will carry the date, the ground and the result as soon as the ACB publishes them. Until then, the schedule and the points table are the places to watch.

Frequently asked questions