Twenty-Two for Two at Stormont, and Afghanistan Still Chased Down the Biggest Total They Have Ever Chased

Stormont on a Saturday in the middle of August gave both sides everything they could have asked for and then decided the match anyway. There was sun. There was a good, true surface that never once misbehaved. There were 600 runs. And for about forty minutes in the middle of the afternoon there was the very real prospect that Ireland would finally win a game in this series — Afghanistan two down for 22 inside six overs, the new ball talking, Barry McCarthy running in with the sort of rhythm a bowler finds twice a summer.

Then Rahmat Shah walked out and, in the least theatrical way imaginable, took the game away. He was there when it started going wrong and he was there at the end, 143 not out from a chase of 299, having watched five partners come and go and having made sure the required rate never once got ahead of him. It is Afghanistan's highest successful run chase in ODI cricket. It was also, in its way, the least dramatic passage of the whole series.

Ireland's innings was the best they have played all summer, and it is worth saying so before the rest of this review does what the scoreboard did to it. Curtis Campher has been the one Irish batter in this series who looked entirely at home against Afghanistan's spin, and on Saturday he built rather than counter-attacked: 96 from 84, the acceleration held back until the last ten overs, four short of a hundred he has earned three times over in a fortnight and got none of.

Harry Tector's 53 from 80 was the other half of the structure — slower than Tector at his best, but the innings the situation asked for, holding an end while Afghanistan's spinners bowled through the middle. Between them they made the difference between the 240-ish Ireland had been managing and a total that genuinely required Afghanistan to bat well. Azmatullah Omarzai's 3 for 74 was expensive and effective at the same time, which is the modern seam-bowling all-rounder's lot: he took the wickets that stopped 298 becoming 330.

He came in with the score at 22 for 2 and six overs gone, which is the precise situation in which Afghanistan's chases have historically fallen apart. He left it 302 for 4 with seven balls unused. There is nothing flashy in a Rahmat Shah hundred; there rarely is. He works the ball into gaps, refuses to give the bowler a second consecutive dot early, and lets the required rate come to him rather than chasing it. It is not the first ODI hundred he has made against Ireland, and it is comfortably the most valuable innings of his career — the anchor of the highest total his country has ever run down.

Three days after making 143 on his twenty-fifth birthday in the fourth ODI, Atal walked into a crisis and made 98 more. He was the aggressor in the 201-run stand, taking on the short boundary and forcing Ireland to spread the field earlier than they wanted to, which in turn is what made Rahmat's singles so freely available. Out two short of a second hundred in four days, and it will bother him about as much as being on the winning side allows.

The 201 they put on is now Afghanistan's biggest third-wicket partnership in ODIs, past the 184 Rahmat and Hashmatullah Shahidi made against this same opposition in Abu Dhabi in 2021. There is a neat thread running through Afghanistan's record book at the moment: the 231 Atal and Ibrahim Zadran made in the fourth ODI on Wednesday was the highest for any Afghanistan wicket, and now the third-wicket mark has gone in the same week, against the same opponent, on the same square. Five matches at Stormont have rewritten two entries in a national record book. That does not usually happen on a bilateral tour in Belfast.

What it says about Afghanistan is that the batting has finally caught up to the bowling. For most of the last decade the story was Rashid, Mujeeb, Nabi — a spin attack good enough to defend anything and a top order that could not reliably give it something to defend. In this series Afghanistan chased 299, made 343, and passed 300 twice. Rashid still finished Player of the Series with 12 wickets. But he did not have to win a match on his own, and that is the change.

For Ireland, 4-0 is a brutal way to write down a series in which they were competitive in at least three matches. Balbirnie made 109 and 145-worth of top-order runs across the fortnight; Campher's 96 and 84 were high-class; McCarthy's 3 for 37 on Saturday was as good a new-ball spell as any Irish seamer has bowled this year. They still lost every game, and the reason is consistent enough to be a diagnosis rather than bad luck: they cannot close. In the fourth ODI they made 301 chasing 344 and lost by 42. Here they defended 298 and were beaten with an over to spare. Ireland arrive at the end of matches with the right numbers and the wrong number of wickets in hand.

Jai Moondra's 1 for 66 tells the other half of it. Ireland's second-change options have been picked off in every game of this series, and against a side with Afghanistan's spin-hitting depth, an attack that is three bowlers deep rather than five is a structural problem, not a selection quibble. That is the thing to fix before the next assignment; the batting is closer than the scorelines suggest.

Afghanistan's previous highest successful ODI chase, and the third-wicket record that fell on Saturday, both trace back to fixtures against Ireland. The 184-run stand between Rahmat Shah and Hashmatullah Shahidi in Abu Dhabi in January 2021 stood for more than five years as the country's best for the third wicket. It was Rahmat who broke it, in the same role, against the same opponent — and Shahidi, unbeaten on 9, was at the other end when the winning runs came.

Afghanistan leave Belfast with a 4-0 sweep, two national records, and the sort of series that quietly changes how a side is seeded in the next global tournament. Ireland leave it with a summer's worth of individual performances and nothing in the ledger. On a good Stormont pitch on a sunny Saturday, that is a harsh way for a fortnight to end — but 22 for 2 was Ireland's moment, and Rahmat Shah made sure it lasted about forty minutes.