🏏Cricket World Cup 2023: Match #9: India vs Afghanistan 11 Oct 🏏

🏏Cricket World Cup 2023: Match #9: India vs Afghanistan at Arun Jaitley Stadium, Delhi on 11 October 2023 at 2:00 PM IST🏏

Afghanistan face up to the ideal they are working towards

India have long been the benchmark ODI side but even they'll know Rashid and Gurbaz, on their day, can trip them up

In his first press conference at this World Cup, Hashmatullah Shahidi spoke glowingly about the ability within his Afghanistan team. Even outside of it, the talent at their disposal is incredible. There's a 23-year-old in Kunar who, but for the great Bill Ponsford, would hold the title of the fastest cricketer to 1000 first-class runs. The thing is, though, those kinds of records can sometimes speak to the lack of quality opposition. In a nutshell, that's been Afghanistan's problem in the longer formats.

As coveted as their stars are on the T20 circuit, the chances they have to level up their one-day game are few and far between. Afghanistan have played a mere 29 matches between the last World Cup and this one. Even going as far back as the first ODI they ever played, their tally only comes to 153. There are individual players in the Indian team that they'll face on Wednesday who have played almost twice as many matches.

Experience is how batters learn when to go hard and when not to, when to just reduce risk, absorb the pressure and just trust that you can make up for lost ground. Experience is also how bowlers know it is important to keep hitting the same spot on the pitch over and over and over again. Virat Kohli, KL Rahul and Ravindra Jadeja exemplified this against Australia. No one in the Afghanistan team was able to do anything close in their match against a close rival.

ODIs demand that you hold your nerve and your discipline for far longer than T20s do. The best place to learn that is bilateral cricket. But Afghanistan don't really have that. What they do have - what they've managed since 2012 - are consistent World Cup appearances. It's become the only meaningful way to test themselves. India are the ideal Afghanistan are striving towards and tomorrow they'll see how far they've come and how far they may yet go.

Tag Credit: Sutapasima

India vs Afghanistan Pitch Report

The pitch for this match will likely help the batters. South Africa and Sri Lanka scored more than 700 runs in the last match at this venue. However, in the game before that, the Proteas were bowled out for 99 runs against India at the Arun Jaitley Stadium. Hence, it is tough to predict how the pitch will behave.

India vs Afghanistan Weather Forecast

The weather will be mostly cloudy for this 2023 World Cup game. Rain isn't expected throughout the course of the match. The temperature will hover around 30 degrees Celsius.

Pitch and conditions

The Feroz Shah Kotla was the scene where World Cup records tumbled with South Africa and Sri Lanka aggregating the highest match total and Aiden Markram amassing the fastest century.

"Tired! I won't lie," KL Rahul remarked the morning after India's sapping start to the World Cup. The keeper-bat was chatting to Virat Kohli in an informal setting for bcci.tv, the pair recollecting events from their backs-to-the-wall rescue act against Australia. There's only so much time for reflection in a 10-team round-robin league phase and 24 hours later, India find themselves on the other side of the Vindhyas, preparing to double down on the happy high of a tough win.

On paper it would seem like Afghanistan could offer just the kind of tempered re-centering Rohit Sharma will want for his team between the challenging start in Chennai and the emotionally-charged weekend waiting on the other side. This is not a slight on Hashmatullah Shahidi's men or an assertion that they cannot uppend the established order. More importantly, the cold truth is that this game was worth exactly the same number of points as the previous and the next one.

Even in the longer 50-over format, which can stretch the gulf between two sides with disparate talent pools and allow enough time for the cream to eventually rise to the top, Afghanistan are not a team to be taken lightly. They made it to this tournament without needing a qualifier, won a bilateral series in Bangladesh -- where India have lost on each of their last two visits -- and were, perhaps, a proper understanding of NRR rules away from replacing eventual finalists Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup Super Four.

They have, however, not been the same in big tournament play. It hasn't helped that their first two ODI World Cups have come in Australia and England, conditions less suited to their spin-centric style. However, when the schedule for this tournament was drawn up, Hashmatullah Shahidi will likely have cast an opportunistic eye on this fixture in Delhi with potential for Afghanistan's long-due seminal World Cup moment. There may be a poetic parallel to it too. India themselves got their second World Cup match win in their third tournament against the alpha of that era and never looked back. In that sense, Afghanistan may even be a little ahead of the curve. They came very close four years ago to tripping up India on a sluggish wicket in Southampton. But for them to draw a line under their World Cup inadequacies and go one better this time around, they'll have to come up with something far better than the first impression they served up last week.

Team Watch:

India

Mohammed Shami, who took a hat-trick in this fixture four years ago, is an option on this surface, but to pick him India will have to be willing to sacrifice their batting depth after a not so convincing start against Australia. To that extent, they may consider bringing in Shardul Thakur instead. Shubman Gill is still not available again following his hospitalisation.

Tactics & Strategy:

Mindful of Afghanistan's stronger spin attack, India could likely take the attack to the quick bowlers. The onus will be on Ishan Kishan to pull his weight in light of the uncertainty around Gill.

Probable XI: Rohit Sharma (c), Ishan Kishan, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul (wk), Hardik Pandya, Ravindra Jadeja, Kuldeep Yadav, Ravichandran Ashwin, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj

Afghanistan

Despite defeat in their opener, Afghanistan wouldn't want to tinker with their combination just yet although a left-arm wrist spinner like Noor Ahmad, with experience of offers good value against a predominantly right-heavy line-up.

Tactics & Strategy:

Fazalhaq Farooqi has 19 wickets in the PowerPlay since the start of 2022, behind only Mohammed Siraj (32) and Matt Henry (20). His left-arm angle against a top-order, that has had issues with it in the past, could be useful in paving the way for Afghanistan to restrict India.

Probable XI: Rahmanullah Gurbaz (wk), Ibrahim Zadran, Rahmat Shah, Hashmatullah Shahidi (c), Najibullah Zadran, Mohammad Nabi, Azmatullah Omarzai, Rashid Khan, Mujeeb Ur Rahman, Naveen-ul-Haq, Fazalhaq Farooqi

In the spotlight - Rohit Sharma and Rahmanullah Gurbaz

Any team in the world would love to have Rohit Sharma at the top of their batting order. But he himself doesn't seem to be all that satisfied with where he's at. He's got it in his head that he can be more. For the past two years in ODIs, he's been hitting 'em at better than a run-a-ball: 114 from eight innings in 2022 with an average of 41 and 109 from 16 innings in 2023 with an average of 47. The extra aggression he's been showing has maybe had an impact in his centuries column - he only has two from the last three years - but it does seem to have other benefits. The only team that's been able to score quicker than India (95.65) between the last World Cup and this one is England (98.19).

Rahmanullah Gurbaz will be relishing the conditions that this game will be played in. Delhi has offered freedom to hit through the line of the ball and there aren't many that do that better than him. Right at the top of Afghanistan's order is an agenda-setting batter to whom the entire field is available for plunder. It wasn't that long ago that he was thumping his own team-mates Rashid and Noor Ahmad around in the IPL, scoring 81 off just 39 balls.

Stats and trivia

• Prior to 2022 and 2023, only once in his entire career had Rohit gone through a year's worth of work and come away with a strike rate of better than a run a ball - 100.09 from 19 innings in 2018.
• Having got there in 27 innings, Gurbaz is the quickest of the 13 Afghanistan batters to the mark of 1000 ODI runs

Their head-to-head record stands at:

05/03/2014: Dhaka - India won by 8 wickets

25/09/2018: Dubai - Match Tied

22/06/2019: Southampton - India won by 11 runs

When: India vs Afghanistan, October 11, 2023, 14:00 IST

Where: Arun Jaitley Stadium, New Delhi

What to expect: A warm day in the national capital and good conditions for batting. The re-laid surface in Delhi sports a generous smattering of grass. Even if it is not the same strip, it looks a lot like the pitch that saw an aggregate of 754 runs, the fastest World Cup 100 and the highest total in men's ODI World Cup history. Teams batting first have won five of the last six ODIs here dating back to 2013. But chasing a par total shouldn't be overly difficult.

Did you know?

- Left-arm finger spinners have picked 21 wickets in the first six matches at 26.52 in this World Cup.

- Since his comeback, Bumrah has not gone wicketless even once and in the six ODIs he has conceded his runs at an average of 4.89 per over.

- Among members of India's squad, Jadeja has the most wickets in ODIs against Afghanistan [7 at 10.85] and in Delhi [9 at 20.77]

What they said:

"You know, we play better spin in the nets sessions. Rashid, Nabi, Noor and Mujeeb, we play them every day. So, I think our team is far better in playing spin bowling. So that game [vs Bangladesh] we struggled but you can't say that you are not good enough [based] on one game." - Hashmatullah Shahidi on facing an even more potent spin attack than that of Bangladesh's to whom they lost 6 for 62.