Zimbabwe suffered its second consecutive defeat against India in the Super Eights at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup 2026, but captain Sikandar Raza stressed the positive aspects of the match. He described his young team as “in the process of development” and expressed hope that they would learn from this defeat and move forward.

During the post-match presentation, Raza said, “I always say that you can’t win a match in the first six overs, but if you are chasing a big target, you can definitely lose it. Today, I thought we were quite calm in the first six overs. We were trying to create a chance for ourselves. And I think the batting performance of our boys today was much better than the last match, looking at it we can take away a lot of positives. And that’s what I will do.”

Raza achieved another feat in this match, when he became the first player from a Full Member nation to score 3,000 runs and 100 wickets in men’s T20 International cricket.

India were invited to bat first and the top order gave a brilliant start. Abhishek Sharma and Sanju Samson added 48 runs for the first wicket, and Ishan Kishan made a quickfire 38 runs in 24 balls with the help of five fours.

Suryakumar Yadav (13 runs in 33 balls) and Abhishek (55 runs in 30 balls) also made a good partnership. Tilak Verma (44 not out in 16 balls) and Hardik Pandya took India past 250 runs.

Giving his reaction on the bowling, Raza said, “I think we could have executed our defensive planning a little better. We bowled very aggressively against them, but unfortunately our bowlers could not execute their plans completely. This gave them a lot of runs. And when the train starts moving, it becomes difficult to stop it. If I can say one thing, we could have executed our defensive plans a little better. This allowed us to beat them.” Could have got a better chance to limit at 210-220.”

Chasing the target of 257, Zimbabwe scored 184/6 in 20 overs, which included a brilliant inning of 97 not out (off 59 balls) from Brian Bennett. Arshdeep Singh took three wickets, while Shivam Dubey, Varun Chakraborty and Axar Patel took one wicket each.

On Zimbabwe’s performance, Raza said, “We are also in the process of development. We have a lot of young players, most of whom are playing in this first World Cup and for the first time in India. I don’t want to take it as an excuse, but the lessons we learned from the last match, we absorbed them very well. And you can see how quickly these boys are ready to improve, and today they showed that.”

Now, India will take on West Indies in their final Super Eight match on Sunday, while Zimbabwe will look for a consolation win against South Africa in Delhi on Sunday.

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