MOHALI: Hosts India beat Afghanistan by six wickets in the opening match of the three-match T20 cricket series here on Thursday.
Fireworks in the end from Shivam Dube to round off a pretty comfortable win for India and the hosts take a 1-0 lead in the three-match T20I series. An entertaining game of cricket but with Afghanistan falling 25 runs short of the average first-innings score of 183 runs at the venue, sooner or later, India would have been able to gun down the target and that is what happened.
Earlier in the game, Rohit Sharma won the toss for India after a run of successive 11 lost tosses in a row for India across all formats and different captains and put Afghanistan into bat. Ibrahim Zadran and Rahmanullah Gurbaz laid the platform for the visitors with a 50-run stand.
Skipper Ibrahim Zadran says his side were short with the bat but poor in the field in the opening game of the series.
“We were sort 30 or 40 runs but the boys fought well until the end,” he said in the post-match ceremony.
“We were trying to have a good start in the power play but when we lost the wicket one of us should have gone to the 14th or 15th over.”
