India vs Pakistan Live Match 2022: Who’s Wins Today Match

India vs Pakistan, T20 World Cup 2022 Live Cricket Score Streaming Online Today Match Updates: India take on Pakistan.

India vs Pakistan T20 World Cup 2022 Live Commentary and Cricket Score: Rohit Sharma-led India will be up against Babar Azam’s Pakistan in their Super 12 match at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday. India-Pakistan games aren’t for the faint-hearted. It is not just the players’ skills but temperament also plays a significant factor in the outcome.

IND vs PAK Live: Playing XI

India: Rohit Sharma(c), KL Rahul, Virat Kohli, Suryakumar Yadav, Hardik Pandya, Dinesh Karthik(w), Axar Patel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, Mohammed Shami, Arshdeep Singh

Pakistan: Babar Azam(c), Mohammad Rizwan(w), Shan Masood, Haider Ali, Mohammad Nawaz, Shadab Khan, Iftikhar Ahmed, Asif Ali, Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf, Naseem Shah

Pitch report: The pitch has some nice covering of grass, it is rock-hard. A good batting wicket, overall. There will definitely be some pace and bounce on offer. Captain winning the toss must elect to bat first, reckons Michael Clarke.

18:20 Local Time, 07:20 GMT, 12:50 IST: The Indian team is gathered in a huddle as Virat Kohli gives them a pep talk in front of the jam-packed MCG. If India have a rock solid batting line-up, Pakistan have an equally fiery bowling attack to counter them. Shaheen Afridi, Haris Rauf, Mohammad Hasnain and Naseem Shah – that’s quite a threatening quartet. So like most of the times – it’s once again going to be India’s batting vs Pakistan’s bowling.

“Hardik Pandya just ran a lap around the ‘G in the company of mind coach Paddy Upton. He inside-edged a Shardul Thakur delivery on to his knee right at the end of yesterday’s nets and was walking gingerly thereafter. All clear, it would seem,” adds Kaushik.

Shaheen Afridi is here. Jasprit Bumrah isn’t. That is one match up which is a little skewed in favour of Pakistan. Last time around, the southpaw hoodoo-ed the Indian top-order. There might be some movement off the deck and expect Shaheen to take advantage of that. India would have laid down their plans but will the southpaw come up triumphs again? We shall see…

There is a little bit of a history at the MCG for both the teams. India reinstated in 1985 when they won the World Championship of Cricket that they were the new blue eyed boys of cricket. Pakistan in 1992 had their greatest moment under the sun in cricket when they won the World Cup inspired by their spirited skipper. About a lakh people are expected at the G! Both teams would be under tremendous amount of pressure.

“Chahal not partaking in any drills, just hanging around with the support staff. Ashwin meanwhile has had a fielding drill, run up to look at the pitch and is now bowling at a set of stump parallel to the wicket. Mohammed Shami marking his run up,” quips our correspondent – Kaushik Rangarajan from the G. “The Pakistan team (squad + sup staff) meanwhile congregated in a long huddle before breaking away to start their stretches.”

India a year back were blown away by a settled Pakistani unit, who seemed to be tournament favourites as the tourney progressed before being outdone by the eventual champions Australia in the semis. Their team hasn’t undergone many changes since then and they will again pose a stiff challenge to every team. India on the other hand have a new skipper. They have a new management which has altered and tinkered the mindset of playing this format. They are trying to tilt towards England’s way of playing this format. They feel it is better sometimes to run out of resources before the finish line rather than brood over finishing poorly with unused resources. Just play that aggressive brand of cricket. Pakistan for being notoriously mercurial have been following a set formula which works for them more often than not. The openers take the mantle on themselves and deliver. That middle order might turn out to be a damsel in distress when put to stern tests.

There was talk about the weather but the stars seem to have aligned and the sunny skies seem to be back for the game. This aint some random anamoly in the met department but actually the weather has done a 360 degrees turn. The only downpour that will happen would be of the emotions over the course of the next fours. New found nonchalance versus evergreen mercuriality is how it is supposed to be pitted as.

17:50 Local Time, 06:50 GMT, 12:20 IST: What are the things that are most scrutinized in life? Airport baggages, Annual report cards, final assignments and so on. These things of course are scrutinized and analysed by experts of the concerned field. However, an India Pakistan game gets the attention and catches the imagination of every cricket fan. It gets you talking. Pre match strategies and meticulously made permutations and combinations of the playing XIs are carved out by zillions of arm chair experts. And since the 2009 T20 WC, India and Pakistan have been in the same group in every ICC event as the financial, emotional and every bit of stake is a little too high to be risked for anything.

A week out from their much-billed clash at the MCG, the players and staff of India and Pakistan briefly bumped into each other during a small overlap between their respective warm-up games. The setting was idyllic: A pleasant spring evening in Brisbane, the sun just beginning to slip behind the high-rises of the Woolloongabba vicinity, the floodlights radiant, the Gabba almost empty. Perfect for coffee and conversation.

And there was enough to discuss: family, food and the rain forecast for starters. Their tours had already packed more than 10,000 kilometers of travel, several heavyweight timezone adjustments, some double net sessions, a series of marketing pushes and also some games on top of it all. As the meet-cute lingered, a broadcast producer and a social media manager got wind of this impromptu rendezvous and had cameras turn in their direction. Nothing with these teams is done quietly away from mass scrutiny any more. And India and Pakistan hadn’t even gotten to Melbourne yet.

The cosmopolitan capital of Victoria is where these sides have been asked to face each other next by ICC’s fixture computer, the fifth time in eight T20 WCs they’ve been drawn together in the same first-round group. The importance of the game for the financial and emotional stakeholders has already been overstated. Lest it is forgotten, it has proved to be even more crucial for the two teams themselves. While it may seem facile to pinpoint one result over a five-match group stage as being the spanner in the works, it turns out that defeat in this fixture has eventually proved terminal for the team’s progression in three of the four T20 WCs so far.

This time last year, it was India’s turn to bear the consequences of a poor start when Babar Azam’s side upended the familiar narrative course for these fixtures. That game and two subsequent matches in Dubai at the recent Asia Cup as well as developments at the ACC have added a layer of twist and intrigue to the build-up. India are the team in a slight flux. They have a new captain (at the ICC level anyway), a new head coach, a new mind coach and a new T20 batting ideology. Pakistan would seem slightly more settled. They have a familiarly ferocious bowling line up. In Babar and Mohammad Rizwan, they even have an opening pair that’s a throwback to many solid Indian teams that played percentage cricket. Until of course you get to their middle-order, which serves as an instant reminder that while India’s love for chaos may be new-found, for Pakistan it is a way of life.

The hallowed MCG is thus a great bowl to throw all of this in, top it up with some rain drama and see what comes out of it. Curiously these sides haven’t faced each other here since the 1985 World Series of Cricket final that India won. Pakistan have their own slice of the MCG history. It is here that they enjoyed their greatest cricketing day in 1992. It is a theatre worthy of this big-ticket billing. Like this India-Pakistan fixture, the MCG looms as a massive entity from afar and as you get closer, it becomes all encompassing and draws everything in. Here when the sun slips down and the floodlights come on and 90,000 people take their seats, the setting can hardly be termed idyllic. There will be little time for coffee and conversation.

When: India vs Pakistan, ICC Men’s T20 WC 2022, October 23, 19:00 Local, 13:30 IST

Where: Melbourne Cricket Ground

What to expect: Showers. Those in the ICC and in the broadcast teams have kept a close track of Sunday’s forecast for a week now. It must be said that it has improved in the last few days given the grim prediction a week out. But given that rain is expected around match start time, delays are likely. It could even come down to being a snappy batting shoot-out between the sides and therefore favour the chasing team. If the toss is delayed and the game heavily curtailed, expect captains to knock off a bowler in favour of hitting reinforcements. There are no reserve days for this group game.

T20I Head to Head:India 8-3 Pakistan (includes India’s Bowl-Out win in 2007)

Tactics & Matchups:

The game could boil down to a straight fight between the two most prolific opening pairs in T20I cricket. While India’s openers — Rohit Sharma (avg 15.71 at 123.60SR) and KL Rahul (avg 10.33 at 106.90 SR) have particularly bad records against Pakistan, Mohammed Rizwan has flourished in his three games against India, top-scoring in each of Pakistan’s two wins in the last 12 months. But he has modest returns against both Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Hardik Pandya, the former keeping him to a-run-a-ball, and the latter dismissing him twice in 21 balls.

India used the short ball against Babar and most of Pakistan’s line-up during their recent Asia Cup win, a strategy that could be in for an encore at the MCG with its big square boundary.