Pakistan Younis Khan And India Gambhir Return to Play

On a dry Centurion pitch and a warm day, Younis Khan chose to bat first in Pakistan's first international match against India in close to a year and a half. The crucial Group A match is being played on the same strip that helped the spin of Ajantha Mendis and Roelof van der Merwe in the first two matches.

Younis' turning up for the toss for good news for Pakistan: he had missed their first match because of a hairline fracture. His replacing Misbah-ul-Haq was the only change made to the XI that beat West Indies.

But it was Pakistan's opponents who had major injury troubles, and were going into an ODI without Virender Sehwag and Yuvraj Singh for the first time since January 2007. The good news for them was the availability of Gautam Gambhir to open the innings with Sachin Tendulkar. That pushed Rahul Dravid back to his customary middle-order position, and Virat Kohli was chosen ahead of Dinesh Karthik. India resisted the temptation of playing two spinners, and showed faith in the same three seamers who almost lost them a defence of 319 in the tri-series final in Sri Lanka.

India 1 Gautam Gambhir, 2 Sachin Tendulkar, 3 Rahul Dravid, 4 Suresh Raina, 5 MS Dhoni (capt/wk), 6 Virat Kohli, 7 Yusuf Pathan, 8 Harbhajan Singh, 9, 10 and 11 three out of Ishant Sharma, RP Singh, Ashish Nehra and Amit Mishra.

Pakistan 1 Imran Nazir, 2 Kamran Akmal (wk), 3 Younis Khan (capt), 4 Shoaib Malik, 5 Mohammad Yousuf, 6 Umar Akmal, 7 Shahid Afridi, 8 Rana Naved-ul-Hasan, 9 Mohammad Aamer, 10 Umar Gul, 11 Saeed Ajmal