India Start Against Afghanistan in Delhi, With Two Milestones in the Other Dressing Room
The first of three T20Is begins at the Arun Jaitley Stadium at 7pm. Afghanistan are the nominal hosts, Ibrahim Zadran leads them for the first time as full time captain, and India arrive a bowler short.
India and Afghanistan begin a three match T20I series at the Arun Jaitley Stadium in Delhi today, with the first ball scheduled for 7pm. The second and third matches follow at the same ground on 15 and 17 September.
Afghanistan are the home side. The series is their home series, played in India because that is where they play their home cricket, and the scorecard will read Afghanistan against India even though every ball is bowled in Delhi.
A first assignment for a new captain
Ibrahim Zadran takes charge for the first time as Afghanistan's full time T20I captain. He inherits a side in the middle of a generational handover, with Mohammad Nabi and Rashid Khan still in it and a group of players in their early twenties around them.
Two of the older generation arrive at round numbers. Rashid Khan went into this series seven wickets short of 200 in T20 internationals, a mark no bowler has reached. Mohammad Nabi went into it 52 runs short of 2,500 T20I runs, which no Afghanistan batter has reached either. Neither is likely to fall tonight, and both are likely to fall inside the next fortnight.
Naveen ul Haq returns after a stress fracture in his right shoulder that cost him the West Indies series and the T20 World Cup. Gulbadin Naib is recalled. It is close to a full strength Afghanistan side, which has not always been true of their recent white ball cricket.
India are a bowler short, and have a selection problem at the top
Harshit Rana was ruled out of this series and the Asian Games after straining his rectus femoris while bowling in a match simulation on 7 September, during his rehabilitation. Yash Thakur, of Vidarbha, replaces him in both squads. Thakur played two T20Is on the Zimbabwe tour in July and took four wickets.
The other three players named subject to fitness clearance have all come through it. Jasprit Bumrah, back from the knee injury that kept him out of the Sri Lanka Tests, Washington Sundar and Nitish Kumar Reddy are all in the matchday squad.
That leaves Shreyas Iyer with a pleasant problem and an unpleasant one. The pleasant one is that Sanju Samson and Varun Chakaravarthy are both back after missing Zimbabwe. The unpleasant one is that Samson, Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and Abhishek Sharma are three openers for two places, and leaving out any of them invites a week of argument.
Iyer has also won the toss in each of his first nine internationals as captain, which is the sort of run that gets mentioned right up until it ends.
What the ground usually gives
We hold ball by ball records for 95 completed T20 matches at the Arun Jaitley Stadium, going back to 2013. The first innings score across them averages 170 and the median is 168. The spread is wide, from 75 at one end to 278 at the other, and the second innings average of 156 reflects the matches that finish early rather than any collapse in scoring.
A par score here is therefore somewhere close to 170, with the caveat that most of those 95 matches are IPL games played in April and May, and a September evening in Delhi is a different proposition.
The record between them
India have won every completed T20I the two sides have played. That is the honest way to put it, and it is the part of the record that matters: Afghanistan have beaten most of the major sides at least once in this format, and India are the exception.
Our [batting predictions for this match](/predictions) are published for every player in both announced squads, and update once the XI is known at the toss.