Last chance for India, New Zealand to fine-tune preparations for T20 World Cup

Next week, the Men in Blue will begin their defence of the T20I World Cup in Mumbai. Before that, though, they have some unfinished business in this smaller, quieter coastal city.

They may have sealed the five-match T20I series against New Zealand in the shortest way possible: winning the first three games. But, after that, they suffered a reverse in the fourth match at Visakhapatnam. They should be determined to win the final game at the Greenfield Stadium in Thiruvananthapuram on Saturday (January 31, 2026) and thus go into the World Cup opener against the United States with momentum on their side.

After conceding the ODI series to the Kiwis 1-2, the Indians have shown in the first three T20Is how good they could be in the shortest format. They have shown, in particular, how their batters could take the game away from the opposition in no time.

Two of the three fastest T20I fifties in India have come during this series. Abhishek Sharma scored the second fastest in the third match at Guwahati – off 14 balls, two balls less than his mentor Yuvraj Singh, whose record from the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007is still intact, remarkably enough.

In the fourth match, Shivam Dube struck a 15-ball fifty, as he raised hopes of an unlikely win after half the side was back in the dugout by the 11th over, chasing a daunting target. The all-rounder’s 23-ball 65 should have gladdened the team management, which had experimented a bit in that game.

This is, of course, the one last chance for both teams to experiment and to fine-tune their ideal eleven for the World Cup. For someone like Sanju Samson, this is even more important as he hasn’t got going even once in his four visits to the middle. And this is the hometown of the wicket-keeping opener.

While the breathtaking display of clean hitting from the other end by Abhishek ensures the PowerPlay goes India’s way more often than not, the team surely will want both the openers to fire in the World Cup.

As for Mitchell Santner’s men, they should be keen to replicate their effort in the fourth game, which they won rather comfortably in the end – by 50 runs, thanks in small measure to opener Tim Seifert’s 36-ball 62. It would be interesting to see if they would try out the hard-hitting Finn Allen, who joined the squad on Thursday (January 29, 2026).