Asia Cup 2025, India vs UAE: Favourites Set to Flex Their Firepower

AND WE’RE UNDERWAY! The opening match of the tournament saw Afghanistan steamroll Hong Kong by 94 runs, with Sediqullah Atal, Azmatullah Omarzai and Co laying down a marker for what their rivals can expect in the coming days. Further, a mature and intelligent performance with the ball saw the Afghan team make short work of Hong Kong’s run chase. On Wednesday, the action moves swiftly to Group A where it’s time for Suryakumar Yadav to lead his charges into the Dubai International Cricket Stadium to take on hosts, the UAE.

HEAD TO HEAD

The two countries have faced each other on the cricket field on a total of four occasions: Three of these were ODIs and there was a solitary T20 game played in Bangladesh’s Mirpur during the first-ever T20 Asia Cup back in 2016. For fans of random trivia, this match that India won by nine wickets saw Pawan Negi make his one and only appearance in Indian colours.

Needless to say, India won all four of these matches at a canter. Interestingly, Jasprit Bumrah is the only member of that 2016 Asia Cup side to still be in the Indian side. While the UAE team is also full of new faces, there is one member of the setup who will be all too familiar to their opponents: Coach Lalchand Rajput. Readers may recall Rajput as India’s coach when the team won the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007. 

THE BIG STORY...AND SOME SUBPLOTS

Home advantage can sometimes be a game-changer. However, that is unlikely to be the case this time around. And that’s not even because of the sheer size of the Indian diaspora in the UAE. India are the defending Champions Trophy and T20 World Cup champions, so their white ball pedigree cannot be overstated. Additionally, this is an Indian team that barely seems to be missing the likes of Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli, with such batting talents as Abhishek Sharma and Tilak Varma stepping up. 

For the UAE, this is an opportunity to showcase how much they’ve progressed as a cricketing nation since their first ODI over 30 years ago. And though the lesson may be a chastening one, they are likely to learn a lot from this match against the world champs, in terms of game management, tactics and so on. 

For India, this match should provide a great way to calibrate and tinker, to ensure they’re firing on all cylinders before they get to the business end of the Asia Cup. Sterner challenges lie ahead in the form of arch-rivals Pakistan and two of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Afghanistan in the next stage (in the extremely likely scenario that India qualify). As Afghanistan showed on opening night, there’s no better way to make a splash in a tournament than a thumping victory in the first game, and this is exactly what India will seek to achieve.

In terms of the lineup, the likely makeup of the Indian team is Abhishek Sharma, Shubman Gill, Tilak Varma, Suryakumar Yadav, Axar Patel, Hardik Pandya, Jitesh Sharma, Kuldeep Yadav, Varun Chakravarthy, Arshdeep Singh and Jasprit Bumrah. Despite a prolific domestic season, Sanju Samson is likely to sit this one out because vice-captain Gill will open the batting. Elsewhere, India will likely opt for the wrist-spin of Kuldeep over the medium pace of Shivam Dube, because the conditions appear to be a lot more conducive to spin. And finally, the outcome of the match does seem fairly straightforward, but a UAE win would be an upset for the ages. 

Karan Pradhan is editor-in-chief of Story Mode, a gaming and gaming-adjacent magazine. Follow him on X/Twitter @karanpradhan_

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