India-Pakistan ready to battle

A new Asian derby featuring India and Pakistan will unfold at the Kingsmead Cricket Ground in Durban on Friday night when the teams square up in their maiden Twenty20 contest at the ICC World Twenty20. Despite the brevity of the contest, both sides are expected to be as intense and competitive and delight the packed crowd and TV audiences.

The match should only be of academic interest but then no India-Pakistan game can ever be of mere academic interest. It is about pressure and the ability to cope with that. Most of the 22 men who will take the field at the Kingsmead Cricket Ground on Friday will have much experience of dealing with this special pressure and may handle this challenge well.

With not much history of Twenty20 to fall back upon, it would be tough to stick one's neck out and back either side to win the inaugural contest. Typically of the teams, there is much talent in their ranks and it will boil down to which set of players cope with pressure well. In a short format, there is precious little room for error. "Of course, there is pressure," said Pakistan captain Shoaib Malik. "Whenever we are playing India, there is added pressure since it is a huge game. We don't want to lose any game, irrespective of who we are playing, be it India, Scotland or Australia. We just want to give off our 100 per cent and not lose any game in any format.

"We made some mistakes in the game against Scotland and we cannot afford to commit the same mistakes a second time," Malik said. "I am satisfied with the way we bowled. We made some mistakes with our fielding but I must say we got lucky to make 171 against Scotland. We will sit together and evolve a good plan for the match against India."

India's young side does not have as much time to think about Friday's match with Pakistan since it is due to play on Thursday. "We will start looking at the game against Pakistan only after we complete the opening match with Scotland," India captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni said. "It would be foolish to dismiss Scotland as a no-hoper. Every team has a chance in Twenty20."
There have been some suggestions that this match will make up for the contest that didn't materialise at the ICC World Cup in the West Indies when Bangladesh and Ireland scripted upset victories and took up India and Pakistan's places in the Super Eights.

Dhoni and Malik have been at pains to tell anyone who cares to listen that the World Cup is water under the bridge. "We will all be better off if we forget what happened at the ICC World Cup 2007 and focus on the game on hand," Dhoni said.
Allrounder Shahid Afridi smiled when he was reminded that India had beaten Pakistan in all their World Cup encounters. "But this is the Twenty20 World Cup and anything can happen," he said. "No team can be taken lightly in this format. Our morale is high after securing a win in the opening match and the boys are all keen to secure a win in the huge game against India."


The teams:
Pakistan (from): Shoaib Malik (captain), Imran Nazir, Salman Butt, Mohammed Hafeez, Younis Khan, Shahid Afridi, Misbah-ul-Haq, Kamran Akmal (wicket-keeper), Yasir Arafat, Umar Gul, Mohammad Asif, Rao Iftikhar Anjum, Abdur Rehman, Fawad Alam and Sohail Tanvir.


India (from): Mahendra Singh Dhoni (captain and wicket-keeper), Virender Sehwag, Robin Uthappa, Gautam Gambhir, Yuvraj Singh, Irfan Pathan, Ajit Agarkar, Piyush Chawla, Harbhajan Singh, RP Singh, Yusuf Pathan, Rohit Sharma, Dinesh Karthik, Joginder Sharma and S Sreesanth.