Afghanistan look to take the next step up

Hamid Hassan swerves one through Kumar Sangakkara's defences. He does a cartwheel of sorts. Chasing 233, an anxious, wobbly Sri Lanka line-up is 18 for 3 against a fired-up Afghanistan pace attack.

A year and a month on from that scare in Dunedin, another potentially anxious and wobbly Sri Lanka line-up will take on Afghanistan at another world event. This time, they will not have Sangakkara. They will not even have Mahela Jayawardene, whose 120-ball 100 dragged the team to an eventual four-wicket win on that tumultuous day.

Sri Lanka will have a new T20 captain, who has admitted he was not mentally prepared to take on the role, but could not say no to his board. His board approached him because their regular T20 captain and pace spearhead is battling a troublesome left knee that has kept him out of a number of games recently, and could keep him out of their World T20 clash against Afghanistan.

Sri Lanka have a newly - and hastily - appointed selection committee, and a squad that underwent two last-minute changes: two experienced players replaced two players who made their T20I debuts in the last eight months. Despite that, their squad still contains four players who made their international debuts, in any format, only last year.

Sri Lanka have won only one of their last six T20I matches. That win came against UAE, after a less-than-convincing performance.

Afghanistan will look at all this and tell themselves they can take down Sri Lanka. Not just scare them, but actually go ahead and beat them.

Afghanistan have reached the Super 10s with three wins in three first-round matches. They have a 16-3 T20I record since January 2015, but have not faced a Full Member apart from Zimbabwe in that period. Here, now, is their chance. They will believe they can beat Sri Lanka, and will not count themselves out against South Africa, England and West Indies either.

"I think they will beat one or two teams, definitely," Hamilton Masakadza said, after Afghanistan knocked his side out of the tournament. "They are a little bit better suited to Asian conditions than the other guys, and on their day they can really pull out a good game. So I think, just looking at the rest of the tournament, they could pull out a surprise or two."

By Asian conditions, Masakadza probably meant conditions akin to the slow, low pitches that Afghanistan played all their matches on during their first round in Nagpur. In those three matches, their four main spinners - Rashid Khan, Samiullah Shenwari, Mohammad Nabi and Amir Hamza - picked up 14 wickets at an average of 14.93, while conceding only 5.81 runs per over.

Despite the presence of Hamid and Dawlat Zadran in their line-up, Afghanistan's modus operandi was rather different to their pace-centric approach during last year's ODI World Cup, but one that was perfectly tailored to the conditions they encountered. Despite the superior opposition they will face in the Super 10s, similar pitches could allow Afghanistan to keep competing hard.

Afghanistan's Super 10 meetings will pit them against Sri Lanka in Kolkata, South Africa in Mumbai, England in Delhi and West Indies back in Nagpur, where conditions are unlikely to change drastically between now and March 27.

Given that the other three venues have only hosted one T20I each before this tournament, it makes sense to dip into their ODI records to get an idea of the conditions they could provide. Among Indian grounds that have hosted five or more ODIs since the start of this decade, Eden Gardens and the Feroz Shah Kotla are the only two where spinners collectively average under 30, have strike rates below 40, and economy rates below five an over. Afghanistan should travel to Kolkata and Delhi with a certain sense of anticipation. The Wankhede, which generally offers more pace and bounce, will probably provide Afghanistan's batsmen their only real test of technique, against a pacy South African attack.

Even otherwise, batting is Afghanistan's weaker suit - potentially explosive but also prone to collapses. They have tried to counter this by packing their side with batsmen, and as a result Shenwari, a batting allrounder, and Najibullah Zadran, a specialist batsman, have batted only once each in their three first-round matches. Having that insurance down the order has meant weakening the bowling attack: the left-arm quick Shapoor Zadran is yet to play a game and the left-arm spinner Hamza has featured only once.

It is a compromise, but it has paid off till now. The batting depth allowed Afghanistan a degree of breathing room even when they slipped to 63 for 4 against Zimbabwe. Their captain Asghar Stanikzai said he knew there were batsmen to come even if Nabi or Shenwari - who put on a match-winning stand of 98 - had been dismissed cheaply. "No, [I wasn't worried]," he said. "We played nine batsmen."

It may not work nearly as well against stronger teams, who will look to put pressure on the likes of Nabi, Shenwari and the medium-pacer Gulbadin Naib, who floats somewhere between the categories of part-timer and genuine allrounder. They will also come a lot harder at the top order than Scotland, Hong Kong or Zimbabwe did.

But Afghanistan know all this and will be prepared. The pressure of getting through a qualifier is off them, and they might play with even more freedom than they normally do, if that's even possible. They will have nothing to lose.