Although Pat Cummins’ hat-trick helped in restricting the Afghans to 148/6, the Aussie batters failed to chase it down, courtesy of exceptional bowling spells from Gulbadin Naib and Naveen-ul-Haq, who shared seven wickets between them, succumbing to their first loss of the T20 World Cup 2024.

The Australian captain was full of praise for Afghanistan and gave them due credit for the stunning win.

“Well, I mean first things first, I thought Afghanistan were really good and they outplayed us and they deserved to win that game. There’s a lot of things you can look at, the reality is there are small margins here. When the scores are low, we had an off-one in the field. But yeah, got to give credit where credit is due and Afghanistan was pretty good,” Marsh added.

Currently, India sit at the top of the Group 1 standings with four points while Australia (second) and Afghanistan (third) share two points each with Bangladesh yet to win a Super Eight match.