Funny month, June 2026. If you’d switched off your phone on the 21st and gone on holiday, you’d have come back convinced Indian cricket was in the healthiest place it’s been in years. Afghanistan flattened at home. A new captain settling in nicely. Young batters scoring hundreds like it was net practice.
And then Belfast happened.
I’ve been following this team long enough to know that Indian cricket rarely does quiet months, but even by our standards, June was a rollercoaster. Two tours, two completely different stories. Let me walk you through both, because the Afghanistan series deserves more credit than it’s getting, and the Ireland trip… well, we need to talk about the Ireland trip. (And if you want ball-by-ball coverage and proper analysis on all of this, Khel Now has been all over it.)
Afghanistan finally get their India tour
First, some context that often gets lost. Afghanistan have practically grown up in India as a cricketing nation. They’ve used Indian grounds as home venues, half their players are IPL regulars, and yet, until this June, they’d never had a proper bilateral tour of India with a Test match attached. So when the BCCI announced the fixtures back in March, one Test plus three ODIs from June 6 to 20, it felt overdue.
Four venues got the nod. New Chandigarh’s Maharaja Yadavindra Singh Stadium hosted the Test, and then the ODI circus moved through Dharamsala, Lucknow and finally Chennai. A nice little tour of the country, honestly, mountains to the Gangetic plains to Chepauk’s humidity.
Was anyone expecting a contest? Probably not. But Afghanistan have surprised better teams before, and Rashid Khan’s white-ball unit is never a pushover. Or so we thought.
The Test: over before it began
Look, I’ll be honest, there isn’t much to say about the New Chandigarh Test other than that it was a mismatch. India batted first and declared on 564 for 8. Afghanistan then got rolled for 152, were asked to follow on, and somehow did worse the second time, all out for 112. Innings and 300 runs. Done inside three days.
The bit that stings for Afghanistan? India did this without Bumrah and without Jadeja. Both were rested. Ryan ten Doeschate had said before the game that this was about giving squad players a run, and the squad players responded by handing out a beating that senior sides would’ve been proud of.
I don’t want to be too harsh on Afghanistan here. Test cricket is a different beast, they don’t even have an official Test rating yet, and you only learn to play the format by getting punched in the mouth a few times. England did it to them, now India has. It’s part of the apprenticeship. Still, 152 and 112 against an India attack missing its two biggest names is a long way from where they want to be.
Dharamsala: rain, Gurbaz going berserk, and a calm chase
The first ODI on June 13 gave us the game the Test never was, even if the weather did its best to ruin things. Rain chopped it down to 25 overs a side, which in Dharamsala in June is about par for the course.
And credit where it’s due, Afghanistan came out swinging. Rahmanullah Gurbaz played an absolutely ridiculous innings, a hundred off 48 balls, eight fours, eight sixes, the kind of knock that makes you sit up on your sofa. He and Shahidi put on a rapid stand and Afghanistan finished with 194 in their 24.5 overs. In a 25-over game, that’s a serious total. Nearly eight an over required.
India chased it like it was nothing. 195 for 3 with 13 balls left. Seven wickets. Gill took the match award for holding the chase together, and that was that. 1-0.
What struck me about that game was the lack of panic. Chasing at eight an over used to make Indian sides twitchy. This lot just… got on with it.
Lucknow: 402 and a 170-run hammering
If Dharamsala was competitive, Lucknow was a demolition. June 17, second ODI, and India decided to bat Afghanistan out of the series in the most literal way possible: 402 all out.
Four hundred. Against an attack with Rashid Khan in it.
Afghanistan actually fought in the chase, which says something about their character, but chasing 403 against this Indian bowling unit was never happening. They were bowled out for 232 in the 45th over. 170-run defeat, series gone, 2-0 with one to play.
There’s not a lot of deep analysis needed here. One team batted all the way down and kept attacking; the other lost wickets in clumps and couldn’t recover. Same old story when these two sides meet, sadly.
Chennai: Shahidi’s hundred deserved better, but Prasidh and Jaiswal had other plans
The Chennai finale on June 20 was the most interesting game of the tour, at least for the first half. Hashmatullah Shahidi finally got the ODI hundred he’s been threatening for years, a proper captain’s 102, with Azmatullah Omarzai adding a fifty. But it was a lonely effort. Wickets fell in two big clusters around him, Gill ran out two batters himself (his fielding this series was genuinely elite), and 218 was probably 60 short of what Shahidi’s innings deserved.
The man who did the damage was Prasidh Krishna. 5 for 23, his first ODI five-for, and honestly one of the more satisfying spells I’ve watched from him. He’s been the nearly-man of Indian pace for a while, always tall, always hitting the deck, never quite nailing down a spot. This felt like a corner turned, and with the South Africa assignments coming, the timing couldn’t be better.
Then the chase. Rohit and Jaiswal put on 170 for the first wicket. Rohit made 79 and looked in gorgeous touch, but the day belonged to Jaiswal, 110 not out, bringing up the hundred with a six, strike rate above 100 the whole way. India won by nine wickets with 128 balls to spare. A 3-0 sweep, India’s first bilateral ODI series against Afghanistan wrapped up in style.
Here’s a stat worth chewing on: two hundreds in his first six ODI innings. No Indian had done that before, not even Dhawan, who needed seven. Jaiswal isn’t even a guaranteed starter in this ODI team, which tells you everything about the top-order logjam. Gill called it a good headache after the game. Some headache. Gill himself took Player of the Series with 238 runs, by the way, quietly excellent all tour.
So: home summer done, Test won by an innings, ODIs swept, everyone happy. Fly to Belfast, tick off two T20Is against Ireland, come home. Easy.
Yeah.
Belfast, part one: the day Irish cricket changed
Some background before the pain. India had toured Ireland three times before for T20Is, 2018, 2022, 2023, and never lost a single match there. Ireland had never beaten India in any format, ever. The two games at Stormont on June 26 and 28 were scheduled almost as an afterthought, start times even shuffled earlier so they wouldn’t clash with the women’s T20 World Cup game at Lord’s.
India also treated it like an afterthought, and that’s the uncomfortable truth. Bumrah rested. Hardik rested. Siraj pulled out and replaced by Prasidh for workload reasons. Nitish Reddy injured his quad, Suryansh Shedge flown in. Shreyas Iyer given the captaincy for his first taste of leading a T20I side. On top of all that, this was a team in transition anyway; leaving out a T20 World Cup-winning captain like Suryakumar had already raised eyebrows, and even Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, the kid everyone wanted to see, was left on the bench in game one.
Ireland didn’t care about any of our selection drama. Batting first, they made 182 for 9, Lorcan Tucker leading from the front with a 36-ball fifty and Gareth Delany smashing 49. Harshit Rana took three and bowled well, actually, but 182 on that surface was a real score.
Abhishek Sharma gave India a flying start, 49 off 20, and for six overs it looked like normal service. Then he fell, and the whole thing caved in. Debutant Matt Hollard, who nobody in India had heard of that morning, took 3 for 28. Matthew Humphreys’ left-arm spin cleaned up the rest with 3 for 38. All out 148 in the 19th over. Beaten by 34 runs.
Ireland’s first win over India in international cricket. First. Ever. You could see what it meant to them at Stormont, and fair play, they earned every bit of it.
Belfast, part two: one run, and a streak dies
Fine, we all said. Freak result. Wake-up call. India will steamroll them in the second game and we’ll move on.
Instead we got a game that was somehow more agonising. Ireland made 154 for 8, and it didn’t look like enough, but Harry Tector, playing his 100th T20I of all games, dropped anchor with a gritty fifty, farming the strike, cashing in when bowlers erred (poor Shedge went for 22 in one over, including a free-hit full toss). It was old-school, calculated batting, and it won them the match.
Because India’s chase was a mess. 41 for 4 in the powerplay. Jai Moondra, a young Irish quick who’d debuted two days earlier, ripped out three wickets in what felt like the blink of an eye. India kept finding partnerships and kept losing them, and it came down to Harshit Rana slogging 21 off 10 at the death. He nearly pulled it off, too. Nearly. 153 for 9 at the end of the 20th, with Harry Tector, of course it was Tector, bowling the final over.
Ireland by one run. Series: Ireland 2-0.
Let that sit for a second. The T20 World Champions, swept, by a side that had never beaten them before that week. And with it went India’s unbeaten run in T20I series, sixteen series, close to three years, gone in Belfast in the space of 48 hours. Moondra took Player of the Match and Player of the Series for his five wickets. Prince Yadav and Shedge got debuts, which on any other day would’ve been the story.
So what do we make of all this?
Two things can be true at once, and June proved it.
The ODI side is in genuinely great shape. Gill’s captaincy looks assured, Prasidh looks ready for the big overseas tests, Jaiswal is forcing selectors’ hands, and Rohit still bats like Rohit. The Test win, even against weak opposition, showed depth beyond the first eleven.
But the T20 setup has questions to answer, and “we rested everyone” isn’t a full excuse. Rotation is sensible; rotating Bumrah, Hardik and Siraj simultaneously, dropping proven match-winners mid-transition, and handing a debutant captain a half-new squad in Irish conditions? That’s not rotation, that’s rolling dice. Either the second-string depth is thinner than the management believed, or the environment wasn’t right, or both. The selectors owe us some honesty here.
And spare a thought, a genuinely admiring one, for Ireland. Tector, Tucker, Hollard, Moondra, Humphreys. That’s a core. What they did in June wasn’t luck; you don’t defend 154 against India by accident.
Strange, brilliant, humbling month. Cricket, basically. For everything that comes next, India in England, then Sri Lanka, plus all the fallout from Belfast, keep an eye on Khel Now, where the cricket coverage doesn’t take a month off even when India probably wishes it could.
