India vs Afghanistan - Five talking points at the end of the match

#2 Commendable Indian display

Wrapping it all up

While enough has been said about the shortcomings of Afghanistan, it does not mean that Indians dominated solely at the expense of their hapless neighbours. Clinical displays from the batsmen first, and the bowlers later, did more than half the job for India.

India started off their batting with excellent intent. Shikhar Dhawan hammered the Test novices all around the park, including his SRH-teammate Rashid Khan to become the first Indian in history to score a hundred before lunch on Day 1.

Vijay, on the other hand, scored a typically composed hundred. K.L.Rahul chipped in with a good fifty as well. After that, India had a mini-collapse before Hardik and the tail did well to stretch the first innings score to 474.

Afghanistan would have hoped for a decent start from their openers - Mohammad Shahzad and Javed Ahmadi - to settle down the nerves in the camp.

However, Shahzad getting run-out and Ishant following it up by sending Ahmadi back to the hut, started the fireworks.

Umesh Yadav, his bowling partner, joined in the act by bagging the scalp of Rahmat Shah. Since then, Afghanistan continued to lose wickets in bunches, with Ashwin and Jadeja acting up as well, the former landing four scalps by the end of the Afghan innings.

The second innings was like a repeat of the first innings, with Jadeja and Ashwin reversing roles, but that was the only prominent change visible on the outside.

After the pacers rattled out the top-order, Jadeja and Ashwin cleaned up the rest. Finally, the entire team fell a few runs short of either of Dhawan's or Vijay's singular performances.

Overall, it looked like whatever the Afghans arrived revising before their exam, the questions were completely out of syllabus, with the visitors having had no adequate solution for nothing - be it Dhawan's early onslaught, Hardik's late pyrotechnics, Vijay's patience, Ishant-Umesh duo's swinging deliveries, or the orthodox spin attack by Ashwin and Jadeja.