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In the inevitable Afghanistan free fall that was bound to occur on the third day, India arrived at a result without overstretching the batting and bowling departments. With 14 wickets felled shortly after tea on Monday, Shubman Gill’s men also held time to rearrange the record books with India’s largest ever innings victory – by an innings and 300 runs. The new PCA Stadium’s subdued Test initiation also successfully soft-launched India’s bid to regain their sub-continental flavours before the World Test Championship (WTC) trip to Sri Lanka in two months. Adding onto the 412-run innings lead that they sucked out inside 20 overs in the morning would have meant a futile exercise in the heat. Having bundled the visitors at 152, Gill decided it was best to deploy his spin forces back on again, with a sprightly debutant and a poised off-spinner’s drifters muting the Afghan resistance. Ten minutes after he led his side off the field with a rare feat in his first Test match bowling innings, Manav Suthar was back on, this time with the new ball. The Afghans took aggressive measures to ward off the debutant left-armer, but Suthar had delivered a good account of his strengths already in the morning. Starting the session with three scalps – the first of which came off just his fourth delivery on day two – Suthar nimbly doubled his tally. Exercise in control The 23-year-old from Rajasthan did not seek to impress. Rather, he nailed down his strengths, ball by ball, across 22 overs that jotted 118 dots and six wickets for only 33 runs. Save the reputation of the opposition, the figures remain exceptional for the conventional debutant nerves. Suthar achieved a stamp of approval in becoming only the seventh Indian to bag a five-for in his first innings on debut, and only the second to reach the landmark this century. The restraint on lengths was remarkable even when he swerved the ball from left to right with prodigious drift, as he did to defuse Afghanistan’s brickwall Rahmat Shah for his fifth wicket. For a majority of his innings, No. 4 Shah had played well within his body. Smearing boundaries from simple extensions of his compact defence, Shah’s half-century justified his position as Afghanistan’s record run-scorer in the format. But when Suthar foxed him on the angle, sliding way past the right-hander’s eyeline outside the off-stump, Shah’s attempted sweep was mangled from around his pads, the ball turning back square to knock the middle-stump. There was minimal deviation from his drift-and-revs exhibition on length. 98 of his 122 deliveries in the first innings landed between the 4 to 6-metre mark on good length, further pressed into a dangerous corridor in line of the stumps. He rarely employed quivers past his usual strengths. Only one delivery in his entire spell was marked as a quicker variation, with just seven instances of an arm ball being released. Suthar only turned to his secondary line after nine wicket-less overs in the afternoon. Setting up Afsar Zazai on the shorter length, the left-armer darted a quicker 92-kph arm ball that held its line to trap the wicket-keeper before the stumps.

From Paul to Prompts, predicting FIFA World Cup results has come a long way in the last 18 years. In this age of AI, it all seems a little silly now. From 2008-2010, especially in the World Cup at South Africa, the world banked on a Germany-based octopus called Paul for football predictions. Hatched at Weymouth, England, Paul picked 11 of the 13 winners of Germany’s Euro 2008 and 2010 World Cup campaigns. It would all have been laughed off as a hoot of a joke, but things did get serious enough for then Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to declare poor Pauli as “the symbol of Western decay and decadence.” When Paul picked Germany to defeat Argentina and that panned out, an Argentine chef threatened to pan-sear him. The recipe had started with detailed braising of the sea animal turned football pundit. His German minders pledged to allow no such thing, but then Paul was declared traitor when he offended German fans by predicting the home team would lose. They too announced they would eat him. A Singapore parakeet fetched better efficiency, but Paul had by then retired from dipping into jars with mussels, oysters and two competing national flags, his first choice of snack considered the winner. He died in late 2010, but not on a plate. The smart-armed creature posthumously received attention from iPhone apps, Google doodles and even Chinese movie thrillers. Sixteen years hence, though, not many are staring at aquariums. They are squinting into smartphones and at whirring supercomputer screens to identify the FIFA World Cup winners. Getting AI to guess the winner on July 19 however, is irresistible. USAToday used Copilot, though they offered an insightful disclaimer up-front. “Large Language Models aren’t keeping up with sports results and matches.” This led to refining of Prompts. Nevertheless, Copilot had France ejecting Argentina in the round of 16, Morocco making the semis, Canada beating South Korea and France defeating Brazil in the final. AI engineering developers had resoundingly proven one basic English question fed into a comp is smarter than 8-armed octopuses. Frank Andrade on Artificial Corner deployed Claude to analyse 49,000 matches, with old ones diminishing in importance, and used an Elo score (fewer points for defeating lower ranked) to find his way to Spain at 27% odds, Argentina 21%, with France and England in semis. AI re-ran the testing 50,000 times, to be sure. And a retrospective AI test on 2018 and 2022 WCs led to 52% correct results. ActionNetwork.com picked France, using 1200 data points across 25 variables, with Norway predicted to throw up a surprise. A spokesperson said “the 2026 World Cup outcome was predicted based on key data, including national team form, World Cup history, market value of squads and coach profiles.” France’s market value? €1.48 billion, as per the website. Depending on precise Prompts, Opta AI can summon France and Spain as favourites, while slotting Norway into the Top 10, while ChatGPT lines up Spain, France, Argentina, England, Portugal, Brazil. It is not too different from what a casual fan, not enamoured by Messi, might pick.

Sachin Tendulkar had been watching carefully. Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s seam, he noticed, was no longer pointing anywhere in particular. Not towards slip for the outswinger, not towards leg slip for the inswinger. When the ball landed, it could go either way. The batsman’s only information arrived after the ball had already moved. “He’s right,” Bhuvneshwar says, when asked about Sachin. “And who can observe better than him?” This is June 2026. Sachin has just been analysing Bhuvneshwar’s wobble seam on social media. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 15 years old, has just broken Sachin’s 36-year record as the youngest player selected for the Indian senior team, after finishing IPL 2026 as its highest run-scorer. The boy Bhuvneshwar bowled with a knuckleball in 2025 is now the most discussed cricketer in the world. And here is Bhuvneshwar, 36, the only man to win consecutive IPL Purple Caps. He had come to the game late, by serious cricket’s standards. When he first bowled in the nets, the coaches told him the ball was swinging. It seemed normal to him. The other kids swung it too. He didn’t know there was anything unusual about his hands until the coaches kept saying it, and even then it was only when he played under-17 cricket that he started to understand what they meant. “I was mainly an inswinger when I started playing cricket,” he says. “Some part of the action changed — think I must have been around 15-16 perhaps. And I started outswinging. Slowly, I understood how to outswing, inswing. This is my luck. I won’t say I was born with it, or someone taught me. It was my luck that some action went wrong, but luckily I understood how to swing on both sides.” Some actions went wrong. Most cricketers spend careers trying to prevent that. Bhuvneshwar’s career was built on it. The outswinger, the delivery that would eventually put him on the Lord’s honours board and make Tendulkar watch a video and think about seam angles, came from something he didn’t intend and couldn’t quite explain. No one taught me how to swing on both sides,” he says. The coaches who shaped him are Vipin Vats, who also taught Praveen Kumar, and Sanjay Rastogi. Both from Meerut. He says he was lucky to have them. At home in those years, the 10-year-old would return from training so exhausted that eating was beyond him. His mother assigned his elder sister the daily duty of feeding him as he lay sprawled on the bed. His sister would feed him while he drooled on the pillow, already asleep. In Meerut, they call a man like this a karmath cricketer. A man who believes in the work, not the mythology around it.