Key events
Right then, here come the players. Abishek Sharma and Ishan Kishan stroll out to raucous noise. Pakistan are going with spin to start, Salman Agha has opted to turn his own arm over for the opening stanza. Let’s play!
The players line up for the anthems. In case you didn’t know, India lead the head-to-head record against Pakistan in T20 World Cups by 7-1. Pakistan lost particularly galling knockout matches to their rivals in Melbourne 2022 and in New York in 2024, they were extremely well placed in both only to come out on the losing side on both occasions.
Predictably, there was no handshake between the two captains.
We might not see boundaries raining quite so freely in Colombo this evening, this wicket has been a little stodgy and has suited bowlers talking the pace off and bowling into the middle of the surface.
Teams:
Pakistan XI: Sahibzada Farhan (wk), Saim Ayub, Salman Agha (capt), Babar Azam, Shadab Khan, Usman Khan (wk), Mohammad Nawaz, Faheem Ashraf, Shaheen Shah Afridi, Usman Tariq, Abrar Ahmed
India XI: Ishan Kishan (wk), Abhishek Sharma, Tilak Varma, Suryakumar Yadav (capt), Hardik Pandya, Shivam Dube, Rinku Singh, Axar Patel, Kuldeep Yadav, Varun Chakravarthy, Jasprit Bumrah
Pakistan are unchanged. For India Kuldeep Yadav replaces Arshdeep Singh and Abhishek Sharma comes in for Sanju Samson.
Pakistan win the toss and will bowl first
The R Premadasa stadium is indeed packed with fans from both sides and Sri Lankan fans who have turned out to see the spectacle.
Pakistan captain Salman Agha calls the coin correctly and inserts India. India captain Suryakumar Yadav isn’t fussed – he says he would have batted first. The pitch will likely be tacky and quite slow, it’s the same one Zimbabwe beat Australia on. Teams incoming!
Not that the billion or so people watching will be thinking along these line but the result of this match isn’t crucial in terms of both sides progression in the tournament. Both teams have won their first two games and can suck up a loss, not that they will want to in this particular match.
Preamble
James Wallace
So here we are. A cricket match will take place in Colombo today.
Last month the Pakistan government announced that they had refused permission for their cricket team to play this T20I World Cup fixture against India in solidarity with Bangladesh. The latter were removed from the tournament after they themselves refused to travel to India because of security concerns. Scotland, who missed out on the final qualifying place to Italy last year were called up to take their place with just two weeks notice.
In actuality, Bangladesh’s decision came amid worsening tensions between themselves and India, a geo-political dispute that has spilt over onto the cricket field.
In January, Bangladesh bowler Mustafizur Rahman was removed from the Indian Premier League (IPL) by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), a direct result of political pressure. Pakistan saw their opportunity to make a move, their decision no doubt influenced by India’s refusal to play in Pakistan when they themselves hosted another ICC event – the Champions Trophy, last year. Cricket was thus used as a political football. Depressingly, this is nothing new.
At the Asia Cup held in Dubai in September of last year, India’s players refused to shake hands with their Pakistan counterparts. They also refused to accept the tournament trophy from the head of the Pakistan Cricket Board. Even more remarkably, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi took to social media after the match comparing the cricket team’s cricketing victory to ‘Operation Sindoor’ – the military conflict fought between the two countries in Kashmir in May 2025.
The last two weeks have seen figures from the nations’ governments as well as the governing body of cricket scrabble to get a game on so as not to jeopardise the ICC’s £2.2bn ($3bn) broadcast deal.
The whole situation is a sad reflection both of the fragility of world cricket’s eco-system as well as a cracked mirror reflecting the worsening relations between countries in a part of the world where the game means so much. Today’s game is now back on after all parties and the ICC reached an agreement, basically that it was too big to not happen.
Writing in The Times, former England captain, journalist and broadcaster Michael Atherton has declared the match a miserable, toxic spectacle. “Once the fixture was one that journalists and broadcasters begged to attend, now it’s nothing more than a proxy for political point-scoring.”
You feel for the players, although comments from some on both sides have hardly helped things either. They won’t shake hands today but they will play a game of cricket. Let’s hope it is a good one and that for a few brief hours the game itself can serve as distraction and balm.
Play begins at 1.30pm GMT with the toss and teams half an hour before that.
