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Ahead of his side's ICC Cricket World Cup match against India at Delhi, Afghanistan captain Hashmatullah Shahidi said that the team is optimistic about spinner Rashid Khan delivering in the next game and what he has planned against the opposition is more important than how they play against him.
India will take on Afghanistan in their second WC match in Delhi on Wednesday. While India won their first match against Australia by six wickets, Afghanistan lost their first match against Bangladesh. In the campaign opener for Afghanistan, Rashid went wicketless in his nine overs, giving 48 runs. "Rashid is the best bowler in ODI and T20s, so whatever opposition is doing, we don't care about that, like how they play, they want to play Rashid, but for us the important thing is how he has planned against the opposition. So that matters for us," said the captain in pre-match press conference. "See, like right now he played a lot in ODIs, like currently we are playing over the last six months we play ODIs so he knows how to bowl and he knows how to bowl to every team. He has the quality and whenever it is his day he can do anything against the opposition, so we are expecting and we are hopeful that he delivers in tomorrow's game," he added. Shahidi said that there will be a lot of crowd pressure in India but they are used to play in stadiums. "When it is the opposition's home, there will be crowd pressure. Especially in India, there are a lot of expectations that the stadium will be packed but as a team our talks are like we have to make these things simple, and we are used to full stadiums - before also we played in Bangladesh and other countries with fully-backed opposition," said Shahidi. "We should not worry as players about those things. We have to keep it simple and we need to focus on our own game and try to deliver our own game tomorrow," he concluded. Afghanistan squad: Hashmatullah Shahidi (c), Rahmanullah Gurbaz, Ibrahim Zadran, Riaz Hassan, Rahmat Shah, Najibullah Zadran, Mohammad Nabi, Ikram Alikhil, Azmatullah Omarzai, Rashid Khan, Mujeeb ur Rahman, Noor Ahmad, Fazalhaq Farooqi, Abdul Rahman, Naveen ul Haq. India squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Hardik Pandya (vc), Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja, Shardul Thakur, Jasprit Bumrah, Mohammed Siraj, Kuldeep Yadav, Mohammed Shami, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ishan Kishan, Suryakumar Yadav. (ANI)
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