The tête-à-tête continued during Nabi’s innings, though, with Nitish returning in the 15th over. First, a thick edge flew off his flick to the wrong side, over short third. Then he sat deep in his crease waiting for the slot ball. He smacked it down the ground.
When Arshdeep Singh returned from the other end a couple of overs later, he got the same treatment, Nabi’s forearms flexing with a tennis-racket-like swivel through the line. Nabi had been part of an 83-run stand with Azmatullah Omarzai, biding his time against India’s spinners. But the next ball, Arshdeep took out his stumps with a yorker.
Nabi was dismissed – for 33 off 27- looking for a flick off his toes. It was a miracle he had batted here, in Delhi, in the first place.
Now, Gambhir is India’s head coach, at the helm of a team that has just secured their second T20 World Cup title in a row. Bowling against them in the chase, the 41-year-old Nabi plucked out two of Afghanistan’s three wickets, both caught by Rashid Khan at mid-on.
The wickets were incidental to the result, and explicit in their craft – Nabi was firing in his right-arm spin on an unhelpful pitch. In fact, he bowled a full toss, then a long hop from a canny wide-of-the-crease angle for his two wickets. Still, his all-round performance signalled just how vital Nabi remains to this Afghanistan side.
Over these past two decades, Nabi has racked up 334 international appearances, 6306 runs, and 296 wickets. But he had played only two games for Afghanistan in the past seven months, since their group-stage exit at the T20 World Cup.
But just playing for Afghanistan with his son is not the full story either. The Afghanistan Cricket Board (ACB), and the team management are keen to have him play on till the 2027 ODI World Cup, because simply put, he remains their best option as a spin allrounder.
But as Nabi showed on Sunday night, when he is fit and firing even in his forties, he remains Afghanistan’s most useful spin-bowling allrounder.
Nabi played only two of Afghanistan’s eight ODIs since February, in which they lost 3-0 to India, then won 4-0 against Ireland. He has still kept busy, playing for Mis Ainak Knights in Afghanistan’s Shpageeza Cricket League, then Guyana Amazon Warriors in the Global Super League and Caribbean Premier League.
His low batting strike rate is negated by some of the slow surfaces that were on offer in Khost, Afghanistan, then the West Indies. Even against India in Delhi, where he batted with a strike rate of 122.22, he mostly worked angles against the two spinners, Varun Chakravarthy and Axar Patel, instead of deploying his usual cross-batted swats.
Nabi’s hand-eye coordination – and his longevity – will continue to be tested over this next year. And against smaller teams, Afghanistan are likely to keep trialling their back-up options while he resumes his T20 globe-trotting.
“I will not play for long,” Nabi had said when he initially announced his retirement from one-day cricket. That remains true. But before he is done, maybe he will have time for one last miracle: to hand his son his international cap, then take the field with him.
Abhijato Sensarma is a sub-editor at Cricinfo
