Winter Olympics 2026: men’s slalom, plus curling, speed skating and m… — and more

NEW DELHI: Heartbreak in cricket can linger, replaying in fragments long after the game is over. For Afghanistan, the double Super Over defeat to South Africa in Ahmedabad has been one such moment. A match that slipped from their grasp more than once and now threatens to derail their T20 World Cup campaign. Skipper Rashid Khan, on Sunday, admitted that the pain is still raw but insisted the team must channel the disappointment into renewed resolve.

Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Afghanistan had opportunities to close out the contest within the regulation 20 overs and again in the first Super Over, only for the match to stretch into a second eliminator where South Africa eventually prevailed. The narrow defeat came after a five-wicket loss to New Zealand in their opening match.



“It is quite heartbreaking. Last one and a half years, we worked very hard... keeping our hopes of going deep in the T20 World Cup in mind, but sometimes it doesn’t go your way. The most important thing is the mindset we played with and the effort we put during our first two games,” Rashid said, acknowledging the emotional toll of the result.

For a side that has steadily risen in world cricket, the loss felt particularly cruel. Yet Rashid believes the experience, however painful, could serve a greater purpose. “It’s going to help us. It’s not only the upcoming games, but the upcoming cricket we have. So, there are lots of positives we can take from those two games,” he said.

The lingering sting of near misses is not unfamiliar territory for Afghanistan. Rashid drew parallels with their agonising defeat to Australia in the 2023 ODI World Cup, when they had reduced the opposition to 91 for 7 before Glenn Maxwell’s blistering double century turned the match on its head. That memory, Rashid said, stayed with the team until they exacted revenge at the 2024 T20 World Cup.

“It’s very hard to lose a game that we have in our hands, like a couple of times, and then it just slips out of your hand. It doesn’t go away from your mind. Like, the game we played against Australia in 2023 ODI World Cup, it never goes out of the mind, until we won against them in the 2024 T20 World Cup,” Rashid said.

Beyond the immediate disappointment, Rashid pointed to a broader challenge confronting Afghanistan, and that’s lack of regular exposure against top-tier opposition. According to him, limited bilateral opportunities against leading teams make World Cup encounters “disproportionately demanding”.

“As a team, if you don’t get a chance to play against a big team regularly, that’s what happens. If we played more T20s against South Africa, New Zealand, we would have had an idea of where this team can beat us and where we can do better. You just play them once a year, and that too at a World Cup event. It is such a time and occasion where you have no choice of making a mistake,” he said.

Also scheduling realities often leave teams like Afghanistan with little margin for error.

“If you play two matches in four days against New Zealand and South Africa, then your World Cup can end in four. We lost both the matches in four days; we are out of the World Cup mostly. So, this pressure is different. If you make a small mistake, you’re out of the competition,” Rashid said.

Greater exposure, he believes, would help Afghanistan better understand and counter the strategies of elite teams. “If you play with them, you’ll get an idea. If you don’t play, then they’ll come with new planning every time... like we saw with New Zealand, they came with aggressive mindset.”