Asia Cup 2025: UAE to face India in opening match in Dubai today
It feels a touch ironic that India, the designated hosts of the Asia Cup 2025, should be “hosting” UAE in Dubai. But given the cloud of uncertainty that lingered over the tournament in the months leading up, the idea of having not one but two kinds of hosts – and of the event happening at all – already feels like a small victory.
This is only the second time India and UAE will meet in T20Is. The first was back in the 2016 Asia Cup, when the UAE crawled to 81/9, a total that India mopped up inside 10.1 overs. The contest was so lopsided that Rohit Sharma walked away with Player of the Match for a 28-ball 39.
Nine years on, the gap has narrowed but not nearly enough. UAE have moved forward, helped in no small measure by the ILT20 and the exposure it has offered their players, but India, in contrast, have surged. The batting has shed its inhibitions, freed first by Rohit Sharma’s freedom template and then supercharged by the IPL’s Impact Player rule. What was once a culture of caution is now anything but.
The results since the T20 World Cup win have underlined that shift, even with Rohit no longer being a part of the T20I setup. India have won 17 of their 20 T20Is in this fresh World Cup cycle, including all five bilateral series they have played, three of them away. And against UAE, they arrive looking every bit the favourites.
If there is any solace for the underdogs, it lies in the fact that India haven’t played a T20I in over seven months, and that the venues in UAE have not always been kind to them. The memory of a 10-wicket hammering by Pakistan in 2021, India’s only defeat to their neighbours in an ICC tournament, still lingers. A year later, defeats to Pakistan and Sri Lanka denied them a place in the Asia Cup final.
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That is not to suggest this is an even contest on paper. India’s resources, both human and financial, tower over anything UAE can marshal but for a side playing at home, at venues where their cricketers have rubbed shoulders with the world’s best through the ILT20, there will be a quiet confidence of at least making India sweat. Stranger things have happened in cricket, no less in Dubai.
India
Probable XI: Shubman Gill (vc), Abhishek Sharma, Tilak Varma, Suryakumar Yadav (C), Hardik Pandya, Jitesh Sharma (wk), Shivam Dube, Axar Patel, Jasprit Bumrah, Arshdeep Singh, Varun Chakaravarthy
UAE
Probable XI: Muhammad Waseem (C), Alishan Sharafu, Muhammad Zohaib, Rahul Chopra (wk), Asif Khan, Harshit Kaushik, Muhammad Farooq, Saghir Khan, Haider Ali, Junaid Siddique, Muhammad Jawadullah
