Forty-Three for Five, and It Still Wasn't Close: Abhishek Sharma's 82 Off 32 Buries Afghanistan in Delhi

There is a particular kind of Twenty20 innings that does not build so much as arrive. Abhishek Sharma played one at the Arun Jaitley Stadium on Sunday night — 82 from 32 balls, seven fours, seven sixes — and by the time the crowd had settled into the idea of a chase, the chase had gone.

Afghanistan will feel the injustice of it, because they had spent the first half of the evening doing the hardest thing in the sport: rebuilding from 43 for 5. Azmatullah Omarzai and Mohammad Nabi put on 83 in 58 balls and dragged their side to 156 for 8 on a surface where 156 looked, briefly, like a number worth defending. It took India thirteen and a half overs to prove otherwise.

India put Afghanistan in and had them 5 for 1 in the second over, Rahmanullah Gurbaz caught for a two-ball nought. That is the sort of start that flatters a bowling side without deciding anything. What decided the innings was the passage between the fourth and seventh overs, when Afghanistan lost Ibrahim Zadran, Sediqullah Atal, Gulbadin Naib and Darwish Rasooli for five runs across seventeen deliveries. Four wickets, five runs, and a total of 43 for 5 at the end of the seventh.

Arshdeep Singh finished with 3 for 19 from his four overs and did the bulk of the early damage with the ball that shapes across the right-hander. Varun Chakaravarthy's figures — 4 overs, 16 runs, one wicket — tell you more about control than about wickets: in a match where 313 runs were scored, one bowler conceded four an over. Jasprit Bumrah and Axar Patel took one each. Nitish Kumar Reddy's two overs went for 30, which is the one line on India's card that a captain will want to look at again.

Azmatullah Omarzai walked in at 41 for 4 and was still there at the end, 64 not out from 44 balls with four fours and four sixes. It was an innings of real discipline: he did not attempt to reverse the match in a single over, he waited for Mohammad Nabi to settle, and the two of them added 83 in 58 balls without ever giving India the wicket that would have ended the contest at 60-odd.

Nabi's 33 from 27 was the more aggressive half of the stand, and when he was bowled at 126 for 6 in the seventeenth over, Afghanistan still had the platform for a finish. They did not get one — Rashid Khan made 1 from 10, Noor Ahmad was run out — until Mujeeb Ur Rahman's 9 from 3 balls and Omarzai's late hitting produced 25 from the last nine deliveries.

The honest reckoning is that 156 was about twenty short and Afghanistan knew it. A side that is 43 for 5 and reaches 156 has recovered magnificently and still lost the match in the first seven overs. Both of those things are true at the same time.

Sanju Samson fell for 10 in the third over, and from 18 for 1 the match simply stopped being a contest. Abhishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan added 121 in 53 balls — a run rate of nearly fourteen — and the remarkable thing about it was how little violence it seemed to require.

Abhishek hit seven sixes. Fazalhaq Farooqi's two overs cost 38. Rashid Khan, the best T20 bowler of his generation and a man who has spent a decade making Indian batters look ordinary at this ground and others, bowled 3.4 overs for 34 and did not take a wicket. That is the measure of the innings: it was not that Afghanistan bowled badly, it was that the length that works against most batters was, for eighty minutes, a length that disappeared over the ropes.

Kishan's 42 from 33 deserves a line of its own. In a partnership where one man is scoring at 250, the other man's job is to stay out of the way and keep the strike rotating, and Kishan did it with five fours of his own. He fell at 139 for 2 with eighteen still needed; Shreyas Iyer and Tilak Varma finished it in the fourteenth over.

The Jaitley surface did what Delhi surfaces in September tend to do: it offered the seamers a little early movement under lights and then flattened out completely. Afghanistan's collapse came against the new ball; their recovery came once it was thirty overs old and the ball was coming on. India, chasing second, batted on the better half of the pitch and with the better ball, and the toss was worth something — though not, on this evidence, the seven wickets and 38 balls that separated the sides.

We leaned towards India, and India won — comfortably enough that the lean looks more confident in hindsight than it felt at the time. We flagged Arshdeep Singh's left-arm swing as India's powerplay weapon and he returned 3 for 19, which is as close to a called shot as this business allows. We also suggested India would field if they won the toss, and they did.

Where we were wrong is worth saying plainly. We built a large part of the preview around Vaibhav Sooryavanshi's expected home T20I debut and Mayank Yadav's express pace. Neither featured in the match. Writing a preview around two players who do not take the field is a selection call we got wrong, not a matchup call, and it is the kind of miss we would rather own than quietly forget. We also named Rashid Khan as the man most likely to decide the game; he went wicketless for 34.

India lead the three-match series 1-0, with the 2nd T20I to come. The questions for Shreyas Iyer's side are pleasant ones: whether Abhishek Sharma's form holds, and whether Nitish Kumar Reddy's two expensive overs cost him his place in a bowling attack that otherwise looks settled around Bumrah, Arshdeep, Axar and Chakaravarthy.

Afghanistan's problem is narrower and harder. Their middle order kept them in this match; their top order lost it. Gurbaz, Ibrahim Zadran and Sediqullah Atal made 24 between them from 25 balls. Azmatullah Omarzai cannot be asked to arrive at 41 for 4 twice more and produce the same innings both times.