Afghanistan get their seminal World Cup moment

Rashid Khan stood at the bowler's end with his arms stretched out diagonally as Afghanistan players swarmed him. The inevitability of what the plucky Asian side had just achieved was swirling in the chilly evening Delhi air for quite some time. Yet it was fitting that the alpha of the Afghanistan cricket team was there to lay the final brick. Away at the dugout, Jonathan Trott was engulfed in a warm group embrace by those sporting Afghanistan shirts as Ben Stokes in a fluorescent bib looked on from the adjacent England enclosure. Dunedin 2015 officially had a companion in Delhi 2023.

Over the last eight days, the notoriously skewed Delhi venue has defined and redefined the limits of what was possible to achieve with a bat in hand. South Africa and Sri Lanka committed crimes against bowlers, and Rohit Sharma showed, against the same Afghanistan attack, how to dwarf an optimistically competent total.

In the aftermath of Afghanistan's second humbling of the World Cup on October 11, Trott answered a rather mundane question in the only way a coach should for that line of enquiry. "Will we be able to beat England? Definitely. Anybody can. If it's a two-horse race, anybody can win." At quarter past six in the evening on Sunday, he took a seat beyond the boundary with a pen and book in hand for notes, while Hashmatullah Shahidi led his players out to defend 282 in the quest to immortalise his coach's words.

If anything could've tipped the scales in Afghanistan's favour, it was an early stroke of luck. Jonny Bairstow mumbled and shook his head on his long, reluctant walk back to the dugout in the second over after a marginal LBW call off a nip-backer from Fazalhaq Farooqi couldn't be overturned on review. The other Trott thought that Afghanistan had to swear by on the day was to keep their emotions in check even in moments of jubilation, for England were armed to render them futile very quickly.

It was the sort of late evening where Shahidi kept himself busy between overs, constantly combining with Mohammad Nabi to set fielding traps and cut out opportunities for England's second-wicket pair to quickly counter-attack. Mujeeb Ur Rahman was Shahidi's PowerPlay controller, as England batters appeared circumspect to take him on. The success of their own spinners had a negative knock-on effect on how they approached facing spin. Mujeeb set Root up with subtle variations in pace in the seventh over, as he got one at 92.5kmph to keep low and sneak in under Root's bat as the latter went back to defend a fuller ball.

Going by England's unending capabilities against the white-ball, it would've been a premature thought for Afghanistan to assume that they were at the wheel even after Dawid Malan's soft exit in the 13th over against Nabi. What they needed was to stack up a collection of moments of inspired effort - pulled out from the depths of their own ability. In the 18th over, Naveen-ul-Haq nudged Afghanistan in the right direction. Buttler saw a full delivery headed towards him and shaped up for a booming cover drive but Naveen had gone wide off the crease and flicked his wrist at the point of delivery to not just angle the ball in, but also get it to nip back just enough to go through the gap and hit the stumps.

At 105 for 4 in 18 overs, England had slipped into Rashid Khan territory, and were vulnerable to a deeper, irreversible slide. Not for the first time in the game, the 27,000-strong crowd got behind Rashid, collectively sighing on near misses as Liam Livingstone struggled to read googlies off the spinner's hand. In the 21st over, Livingstone took a review back with him for an LBW call that Rashid celebrated even before turning around to appeal. That too was a googly that Livingstone couldn't quite get his head or technique around.

This brought the left-handed Sam Curran to the middle and opened up a tactical avenue for Shahidi in the thick of the second PowerPlay. The Afghanistan captain paired up Nabi and Rashid for a short eight-over burst together and had the proverbial walls closing in on a tentative-looking England. Harry Brook still had ounces of resistance in him despite having to walk around complete wreckage. When Afghanistan finally got to him, with Mujeeb's carrom ball in the 35th over, he exited with a 61-ball 66 and a deserved applause from Trott.

England have succumbed to World Cup upsets before. In 2011, Bangladesh and Ireland left them red-faced. In 2015, Bangladesh took the opportunity to sucker-punch them out of the tournament. Even in 2019, Sri Lanka snuck a win. Sunday's result though, should put Afghanistan on a higher pedestal than all their fellow underdogs. They didn't just dismantle an England side at the peak of their ODI powers, but did it without giving them any wiggle room to push back. It may have started out feeling like a banana peel of a fixture for England, but as the second half took shape, it resembled an ice-skating rink that the defending champions stepped onto with their bowling shoes on.