Match Details
That's all we have from the commentary box. Do join us for another doubleheader tomorrow. Till then it's ta-ta and goodnight from me, Arjun Bhalla, on the behalf of my fellow commentators Anurag Dasgupta and Akshay Bhide.
Mujeeb and Nabi took the command with the new ball and the mystery spinner got rid of Md. Rizwan. The Aghani bowling wasn’t about scalping wickets but one brilliant thing they did was, keeping the lid on the run flow.
Pakistan played off Mujeeb and didn’t give any other wicket to him. If the mystery spinner finished his quota, they had a magician named Rashid Khan. The leggie got Babar trapped on the front foot, in the very first over, but DRS overturned the decision. The skipper didn’t put his foot on the paddle and knocked the ball around to take the chase deeper.
Meanwhile Nabi scalped Hafeez and Rashid ripped Babar on the 24th (legal) delivery of his spell, after the skipper notched another fifty. Naveen then got Malik and Afghanistan were ahead in the game, with 24 runs to defend in the last two. Every cricket pundit, every cricketing fanatic would have bagged Afghanistan to end the night on a winning note.
But they had a hurdle named Asif to face.
Pakistan's finisher, as they say, had different plans. He just went behind Janit and spanked him for maximum, whenever the part-time seamer erred his lengths. In the end, Asif Ali gets the Man of the Match for his brisk cameo of 25 off just seven deliveries.