India vs Afghanistan Test Head-to-Head: Record & Results
Written and checked by CricketTakenPublished Cricket in India9 min read
India and Afghanistan have played two Tests, eight years apart, and India have won both by an innings. Between them the two matches lasted five days of scheduled cricket out of a possible ten, and they produced the two largest victories in India's Test history. That is the whole record, and it is short enough that anything described here as a trend would be a guess.
The first, at the M Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru in June 2018, was Afghanistan's inaugural Test. It was over inside two days. The second, at New Chandigarh in June 2026, was the newest Indian Test ground's first match and finished on the third day, with India winning by an innings and 300 runs — the largest margin India have ever recorded in a Test.
What follows is both scorecards, the individual records the two matches set, and a section that says plainly which of the numbers on this page are meaningful and which are artefacts of a sample of two.
The two Tests, scorecard by scorecard
Bengaluru, 14-15 June 2018
| Innings | Score |
|---|---|
| India | 474 |
| Afghanistan | 109 |
| Afghanistan | 103 |
India won by an innings and 262 runs.
Shikhar Dhawan made 107 and Murali Vijay 105 in an opening stand that effectively decided the match before Afghanistan had bowled thirty overs. Hardik Pandya added 71 lower down. Ajinkya Rahane captained; Ravindra Jadeja took six wickets across the two Afghanistan innings including four for 17 in the second, and Ravichandran Ashwin took five.
Afghanistan were bowled out twice on the second day. It was the fourth occasion in Test history that a side had been dismissed twice inside a single day, and the first Test played in India to be completed inside two.
New Chandigarh, 6-8 June 2026
| Innings | Score |
|---|---|
| India | 564/8d |
| Afghanistan | 152 |
| Afghanistan | 112 |
India won by an innings and 300 runs.
Shubman Gill made 126 as captain, KL Rahul 100, and Rishabh Pant and B Sai Sudharsan 81 each. Afghanistan's Mohammad Saleem took six for 140 on Test debut, which is the best return any Afghanistan bowler has managed against India and one of the more striking figures ever produced in a losing innings of that size.
The match belonged to another debutant. Manav Suthar, a left-arm spinner, took six for 33 in Afghanistan's first innings and one for 29 in the second — the third-best figures by an India bowler in a Test debut innings, and enough to make him player of the match in a game in which two of his batters had scored hundreds.
The records these two matches set
| Record | Detail |
|---|---|
| India's largest Test win | Innings and 300 runs, New Chandigarh, June 2026 |
| India's second largest Test win | Innings and 262 runs, Bengaluru, June 2018 |
| Afghanistan's heaviest Test defeat | Innings and 300 runs |
| India's highest total in the fixture | 564/8d |
| Afghanistan's highest total in the fixture | 152 |
| Afghanistan's lowest total in the fixture | 103 |
| Best bowling by an India bowler | 6/33, Manav Suthar |
| Best bowling by an Afghanistan bowler | 6/140, Mohammad Saleem |
The first two rows are the ones worth pausing on. India have played more than 600 Tests against ten opponents, and their two heaviest wins have both come against the newest of them, in the only two Tests the fixture has produced. Neither result was a surprise. Both are, in a narrow statistical sense, the extreme end of India's whole Test record.
Batting in the fixture
| Batter | Tests | Runs | Highest | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| KL Rahul | 2 | 154 | 100 | 77.00 |
| Shubman Gill | 1 | 126 | 126 | 126.00 |
| Shikhar Dhawan | 1 | 107 | 107 | 107.00 |
| Murali Vijay | 1 | 105 | 105 | 105.00 |
| Rishabh Pant | 1 | 81 | 81 | 81.00 |
| B Sai Sudharsan | 1 | 81 | 81 | 81.00 |
Only KL Rahul has batted in both Tests, making 54 at Bengaluru and 100 at New Chandigarh. Four India batters have made a hundred against Afghanistan and none has been dismissed twice in the fixture, which is a direct consequence of India batting once in each match. Averages in this table are arithmetic rather than descriptive: a single innings divided by one is not a batting average in any useful sense, and none of these figures should be read as a measure of anything except what happened on the day.
For Afghanistan the leading run scorer is Rahmat Shah with 91 in four innings, and his 60 is the only fifty an Afghanistan batter has made against India in a Test. Hashmatullah Shahidi has 72 and Sediqullah Atal 59.
Bowling in the fixture
| Bowler | Tests | Wickets | Best | Average |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manav Suthar | 1 | 7 | 6/33 | 8.85 |
| Ravindra Jadeja | 1 | 6 | 4/17 | 5.83 |
| Ravichandran Ashwin | 1 | 5 | 4/27 | 11.80 |
| Washington Sundar | 1 | 5 | 4/36 | 11.40 |
| Ishant Sharma | 1 | 4 | 2/17 | 11.25 |
| Umesh Yadav | 1 | 4 | 3/26 | 11.00 |
Nobody has bowled in both matches, which is why every entry reads one Test. Ravindra Jadeja's average of 5.83 is the lowest of the six and is a curiosity rather than a record — six wickets for 35 runs in a match will do that. Ashwin's four for 27 in Afghanistan's first Test innings and Washington Sundar's four for 36 eight years later bracket the fixture at either end, both from off-spinners bowling on first-innings pitches that behaved perfectly normally.
Afghanistan's wicket takers are led by Mohammad Saleem's six, then Yamin Ahmadzai with three for 51 at Bengaluru. Rashid Khan played the 2018 Test, took two for 154 and has not appeared in the fixture since.
What Afghanistan have got right here
It is easy to write these two matches off, and worth not doing. Afghanistan's second innings at New Chandigarh was 112, but their first, 152, came against a debutant spinner having the day of his life on a surface that gave him everything. Saleem's six for 140 was taken while India were making 564: he bowled long, he kept taking wickets, and no other bowler in that match managed more than two. Rahmat Shah's sixty in a total of that size was the closest thing to a settled Test innings anyone in the side has played against India.
The broader point is scheduling rather than skill. Afghanistan have played very few Tests since gaining status, and almost none against the strongest sides at home or over more than one match. A two-Test sample against India, split eight years apart, with no series to build into, tells you far less about the team than their record in the story of Afghanistan cricket does, and their one-day record against India — where they have played seven times, tied one and made 272 in Delhi — is a fairer test of the gap. That fixture is set out in the India versus Afghanistan ODI head-to-head.
Where India sit in Afghanistan's Test record
Afghanistan have played thirteen Tests in all, and India account for two of them. Set against the rest, the pattern of the fixture makes more sense.
| Opponent | Tests | Afghanistan won | Lost | Drawn |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zimbabwe | 5 | 2 | 2 | 1 |
| Bangladesh | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| Ireland | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| India | 2 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Sri Lanka | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
| West Indies | 1 | 0 | 1 | 0 |
Four wins from thirteen is a quicker start than Bangladesh made — they went thirty-four Tests before winning one — and all four came against Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and Ireland, the three sides closest to them in red-ball resources. Only against Zimbabwe have Afghanistan played more than two Tests. Against everyone else the fixture has been one match or two, often standalone, which is the structural problem behind the two results on this page: a side that never plays a second Test in the same conditions never gets the chance to correct anything.
India, Sri Lanka and West Indies have between them given Afghanistan four Tests and four defeats. That is a small sample too, but it points in a consistent direction, and the two matches against India are the heaviest of the four.
What a two-match sample cannot tell you
Three of the more tempting conclusions from this page do not survive scrutiny.
India have a 100 per cent record, which is true and uninformative. Two matches is not enough to distinguish a side that would win 100 per cent of the time from one that would win 80 per cent. Both results were emphatic, so the direction is not in doubt; the magnitude is not measurable from this data.
Home advantage cannot be separated out. Both Tests were played in India, one in Bengaluru in June and one in Punjab in June, which is an unusual window for red-ball cricket in either place. Afghanistan have never hosted India in a Test, and with their designated home venues sitting outside the country they are unlikely to soon. Anyone quoting a home-and-away split for this fixture is inventing one.
The individual averages are single innings. Five of the six batters in the table above played one Test and were dismissed once or not at all. The same applies to every bowler. Where this page gives an average, it is reported because Statsguru reports it, not because two innings support the inference.
For where the fixture sits in the longer Indian story, see India's Test cricket history and the grounds that have staged it in India's Test cricket grounds. Everything else on the Indian game starts from the cricket in India hub.
Sources and method
The two scorecards, the margins, the individual aggregates and the bowling figures were checked against ESPNcricinfo's Statsguru, filtered to Test matches between India and Afghanistan, on 19 August 2026. Both matches were also cross-checked against ESPNcricinfo's own match reports for the day-by-day detail — the two-day finish at Bengaluru, the debut returns at New Chandigarh — because that detail does not appear in a statistical filter.
Everything in the tables is a count from those two scorecards. Nothing is projected, modelled or averaged across formats. Where a figure is a record, it is described as a record within this fixture unless it is stated to be an all-time India record, in which case it was verified against India's full Test result list rather than against the two matches alone. The section on sample size is analysis rather than data, and is labelled as such.