NEW DELHI — The Board of Control for Cricket in India and the International Cricket Council announced on Wednesday that Afghanistan will host a three-match T20I series on Indian soil in September, completing a 2026 calendar that began with a Test in Mullanpur in June and ran through a three-match ODI series from which India emerged with a 2-0 win and one match still unplayed. The T20I fixtures, confirmed for September 13 to 17 at Arun Jaitley Stadium in New Delhi, represent the shortest format — the one in which Afghanistan have historically produced their most competitive cricket against top-tier opposition. The results from the Test and ODIs are not encouraging company for them to arrive with.
The Test that opened the 2026 series was played in New Chandigarh. For Shubman Gill, the city was not incidental — he grew up near the Maharaja Yadavindra Singh International Cricket Stadium, and he walked out to bat for the first time as India’s Test captain on a ground where the crowd had been following his career since long before he was a national selection. He scored 126. The innings confirmed what the preceding year’s appointment had been building toward: Gill as captain, Gill as centurion, Gill on home soil.
KL Rahul scored 100 from the other end. Sai Sudharsan fell for 81 — 19 runs short of what would have been a maiden Test century. Rishabh Pant made 81. The top four alone accumulated 388 runs, and Washington Sundar reached a half-century before India declared at 564 for 8 in 127 overs. It was the second-highest total the side had ever produced against Afghanistan in Test cricket. India’s declaration left Afghanistan 536 runs behind at tea on Day 2, and the match was functionally over before the third day began.
Mohammad Saleem Safi’s six wickets for 140 runs across 37 overs was the performance that cut against the inevitability of the result. His reverse swing at pace, sustained across a long spell against a batting lineup producing that quality of output, was the kind of effort that earns recognition regardless of what the scoreline eventually says. Six wickets in 564 is not a failure. The problem was that six wickets in 564 still left enough batters to take India beyond the margin that would have allowed Afghanistan to save the match.
Manav Suthar, 23, from Sri Ganganagar in Rajasthan, took a wicket on his fourth delivery in Test cricket. A left-arm spinner making his debut — cap number 319, presented to him by Kuldeep Yadav — he dismissed Abdul Malik with a delivery that extracted turn from the surface and found the top edge to backward square leg. India won the match by an innings and 300 runs.
The ODI series that followed three weeks later carried the same directional signal, though with slightly more variation in margin. The first match, a rain-curtailed fixture at Dharamsala on June 13, ended with India chasing down Afghanistan’s total for the loss of three wickets with 13 balls remaining. Weather compressed the contest, but the result was unambiguous.
The second match, on June 17, was where the series was decided. Gill scored his first ODI century as India’s captain, anchoring the innings that produced a 170-run winning margin and sealed the series 2-0 before the third match was played. Hardik Pandya, who had been ruled out of the ODI leg with a quadriceps strain before the series began, missed both wins. India clinched the ODI series without their primary all-rounder, which said something about the depth of the side and also about the gulf between the two teams at that particular moment in the series.
The third match, stripped of its consequence for the series result, became the occasion for Afghanistan’s most significant individual performance of the 2026 campaign. Hashmatullah Shahidi, the Afghanistan captain, scored his maiden one-day international century in a dead rubber. His hundred did not change the result of the series. That is not the right measure of its importance. Captains who can produce that quality of output in matches without consequence tend to carry that temperament into matches where the consequence is everything. The T20I series starting September 13 will test whether that individual form translates into collective results.
Afghanistan’s T20I performances against top-tier opposition have historically been their most competitive across all formats. Their spin attack — built on high arm actions, variable pace, and the kind of finger-spin variation that rewards the shorter format’s narrower margins — operates differently when the target is 20 overs rather than 50. The window for accumulation is smaller, individual wickets carry more weight, and the margin for error contracts in ways that favour the attacking spin options Afghanistan carry. Three matches at Arun Jaitley in New Delhi in September represent their clearest opportunity of the 2026 series to produce results that the Test and ODI sections did not.
India’s form across formats in 2026 has been built around a captain who delivered centuries in his first Test and first ODI series in charge. Whether the T20I squad reflects the same personnel — Gill’s availability, Pandya’s recovery, the rotation decisions the BCCI makes across a packed September calendar — is a question the squad announcement will answer. The BCCI has not yet named the T20I group for the Afghanistan fixtures.
What the September series adds to the 2026 record — Test: innings defeat by 300 runs; ODI series: 2-0 with an Afghanistan century in the dead rubber — is, as of today’s fixture confirmation, formally unwritten. The scorecard for the three T20Is will be completed at Arun Jaitley Stadium. The only open question across three formats of cricket is whether it carries India’s name or Afghanistan’s at the bottom of the result column.
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