India have won the toss and elected to field first vs Pakistan in their first match of the ongoing T20 World Cup. India have left out experienced spinner Yuzvendra Chahal from the playing XI and added Axar Patel and Ravichandran Ashwin in the lineup.
Before the start of the tournament, Chahal was considered as an impact bowler. The leg spinner also performed well in the warmup games vs Western Australia and had a brilliant record at the bouncy track due to his top spin quality.
While Mohammed Shami was too named in the squad and as a result Harshal Patel is out of the line up. This is the first match for Shami since last year’s tournament in the UAE. Shami was added in the squad as Jasprit Bumrah’s replacement. He was earlier in the travel reserves.
“We are going to field first. Looks like a good pitch, it’s always nice to bowl with overcast conditions. Think the ball will swing around a bit, and we need to take its advantage. Preparations have been good. We played a couple of practice games in Brisbane. Time to come out and enjoy ourselves now. We were expecting nothing less than this, hopefully we’ll entertain them (the crowd). We have seven batters, three seamers and two spinners,” said India captain Rohit Sharma at toss.
“Toss is not in our hands, but we would have liked to bowl first as well. We’ll try to post around 160-170. We have prepared well, and we are ready for this big game. We had a T20 series back home (against England), we played a tri-series in New Zealand, so we are prepared. We have three fast bowlers and two spinners, said Pakistan captain Babar Azam at toss.
Pakistan (Playing XI): Babar Azam(c), Mohammad Rizwan(w), Shan Masood, Haider Ali, Mohammad Nawaz, Shadab Khan, Iftikhar Ahmed, Asif Ali, Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf, Naseem Shah
India (Playing XI): Rohit Sharma(c), KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya, Dinesh Karthik(w), Axar Patel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Shami, Arshdeep Singh
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