Following a humiliating 76-run defeat against South Africa that has left India’s T20 World Cup title defence hanging by a thread, the team management faces crucial selection decisions ahead of Thursday’s must-win Super 8 clash against Zimbabwe at the MA Chidambaram Stadium. With semifinal qualification no longer in their own hands, two significant changes could restore balance to a side that looked completely out of sorts in Ahmedabad.

What changes should India make in their playing XI for Zimbabwe clash?

Change 1: Sanju Samson in for Tilak Varma to break left-hander logjam

The most pressing issue confronting India is the overabundance of left-handers in the top order, which opposition teams have ruthlessly exploited by opening with off-spin. In four of India’s five matches, they have lost a wicket in the very first over – all to spin, and all for ducks . This alarming pattern has left the middle order perpetually rebuilding rather than attacking.

Tilak Verma’s tournament numbers make a compelling case for his omission. Across five innings, the left-hander has managed just 107 runs at an average of 21.40 and a strike rate of 118.88 – well below par for the No. 3 position. His reckless charge at Marco Jansen against South Africa, which yielded a two-ball duck, exemplified his poor decision-making under pressure.

Meanwhile, Sanju Samson’s only appearance this tournament was a blistering 22 off eight balls against Namibia. It demonstrates the kind of explosive intent India desperately need at the top. His inclusion would allow India to counter Zimbabwe’s likely tactic of opening with Sikandar Raza or Brian Bennett’s off-spin .

Change 2: Axar Patel returns for Washington Sundar to strengthen spin department

The decision to bench vice-captain Axar Patel against South Africa was widely criticised as a tactical blunder, and the team management is expected to rectify it for the Chennai encounter. Washington Sundar, selected based on match-ups against South Africa’s left-handers, contributed little – conceding 17 runs in two wicketless overs and scoring 11 off 11 balls with the bat.

Against a Zimbabwe top order featuring predominantly right-handers, Axar’s left-arm orthodox spin and lower-order batting prowess make him the ideal replacement. His ability to contribute with the bat at No. 7 or 8 adds crucial depth that was missing against South Africa.

Also READ: T20 World Cup 2026 – Sunil Gavaskar slams star India batter following humiliating defeat against South Africa

Spinners expected to play decisive role in Chennai

The MA Chidambaram Stadium historically assists spinners, and India may opt for a three-pronged spin attack featuring Axar, Varun Chakravarthy and Kuldeep Yadav. The left-arm wrist-spinner has played only once in the tournament – returning 1 for 14 against Pakistan – but could be devastating on a turning Chepauk surface.

A probable XI could see Ishan Kishan retaining the wicketkeeping spot, with Samson opening alongside Abhishek Sharma or moving to No. 3 depending on match situations . Suryakumar Yadav must anchor the innings amid recurring early collapses, while Hardik Pandya, Shivam Dube and Rinku Singh provide firepower in the death overs.

With their net run rate plummeting to -3.800 and West Indies soaring after a 107-run thrashing of Zimbabwe, India not only need to win both remaining matches but also hope for favourable results elsewhere. The time for bold decisions has arrived.

Also WATCH: Pakistan TV channel dubs Mohammad Amir an ‘astrologer,’ credits him for India’s defeat to South Africa

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NEW DELHI: Four people, including a six-year-old boy, were killed and 11 others injured after a speeding bus collided head-on with two smaller vehicles on National Highway 31 near Bagri Pul in Bihar’s Bhagalpur district on Tuesday evening, officials said.The accident took place around 6:30 pm in the Jhandapur police station area of Naugachia subdivision. According to authorities, the bus struck a small commercial vehicle and an e-rickshaw, leaving multiple passengers trapped and injured.Bhagalpur District Magistrate Nawal Kishor Choudhary told reporters, “In a head-on collision between a bus and two small vehicles, four people were killed and 11 others injured. The deceased include a six-year-old child and a woman.”In a separate statement from the spot, he said, “A head-on collision occurred between a big bus and two small vehicles. Four people have died; two of them have been identified – one of them was from Katihar and another from Khagaria. We are looking for documents in the vehicle but we have not found any. We will hand over the bodies to their families once they are identified…11 people are injured and they have been sent to hospital..,”The deceased have been identified as Arvind Mandal, 40, from Katihar district, Kunal Kumar, 6, from Khagaria district, and Purmi Devi, 35, and her husband Sunil Das, 40, both from Bhagalpur district.Of the 11 injured, eight are undergoing treatment at Jawahar Lal Nehru Medical College and Hospital in Bhagalpur, while three have been discharged. The district magistrate said all the injured are out of danger. He added that the administration is informing the victims’ families, including those residing outside Bhagalpur, through the concerned officials.Naugachia police district SP Prerna Kumar said, “Prima facie, it appears that two small vehicles were hit by a speeding bus on NH-31 around 6:30 pm.” She added, “We received information of a collision between a private bus and two autorickshaws. We reached there. Looking at the seriousness of the incident, all of us reached here…Prima facie, this looks like a speeding bus hitting the smaller vehicles. 4 people have died. Others have been referred to Bhagalpur for better medical treatment…”Police said an FIR will be registered and the driver and the bus owner will be identified for further legal action.Responding to concerns over frequent accidents on the highway, Choudhary said, “There is a lot of traffic on this road. On my request, the government has approved the proposal to widen it. Work will start on this very soon.” He urged motorists to drive safely.

England’s captain Harry Brook celebrates (AP Photo)

TimesofIndia.com in Kandy: Walking out to bat off just the second ball of England’s chase, after Shaheen Shah Afridi had removed Phil Salt first up, Harry Brook made a statement before he even took guard. Promoted to number three instead of being held back as a finisher, Brook seized control of a tricky chase at the Pallekele International Cricket Stadium and shaped it entirely on his terms. What followed was a captain’s innings of the highest order. Calm under early pressure after Shaheen struck three times in the Powerplay, Brook absorbed the heat, counter-attacked with breathtaking clarity, and unfurled a range of scintillating strokes without ever losing control of the chase.

His unbeaten century was not just about power, but about intent, tempo, and tireless running between the wickets that kept Pakistan constantly on the back foot. In standing tall when England briefly looked vulnerable, Brook became the immovable barrier between Pakistan and their fading semi-final hopes. England, with this two-wicket win, have all but cemented their place in the final four. For Pakistan, the door is now virtually shut.Brook scored a sublime 100 and not only registered his highest score in T20 cricket but also became the first captain to hit a century in the World Cup.On a tricky surface, Pakistan could not have asked for a better start. Shaheen Shah Afridi struck with the very first ball, finding just enough outswing for Phil Salt to feather an edge behind. Moments later, the decision by Harry Brook to promote himself to number three was put to the test. Brook began watchfully, working singles and missing a couple outside off, but never looked flustered by the early movement.

Pakistan’s Shaheen Shah Afridi (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

Shaheen soon delivered another major blow, removing Jos Buttler, whose difficult World Cup continued. Buttler slashed at an away-swinger and inside-edged it to the keeper, leaving England wobbling despite the positive start. Pakistan sensed an opening, but Brook had other ideas.With a flick of the wrists, Brook got off the mark with a boundary through square leg and quickly found his rhythm. He judged pace superbly, punishing anything short and using his feet confidently against spin. Pakistan were briefly gifted hope when Jacob Bethell survived a spilled chance off Usman Tariq, but the reprieve was short-lived as Shaheen returned to claim his third wicket, ending Bethell’s scratchy stay.Brook, meanwhile, kept the chase ticking at a brisk rate. He tore into Mohammad Nawaz for 17 in an over, sweeping, lofting, and muscling boundaries with effortless range. At the end of the Powerplay, England were 53 for 3, firmly back in control. Brook brought up a 28-ball fifty, fully justifying his tactical promotion and underlining his value as an innings shaper rather than a late-order hitter.Pakistan’s hopes briefly flickered when Tariq removed Sam Curran, breaking a 45-run stand, but Brook simply recalibrated. He absorbed pressure, ran relentlessly between the wickets, and then exploded again. His assault on Shadab Khan was decisive, highlighted by a clean strike straight back over the bowler’s head into the sightscreen and a boundary to finish a 17-run over.

England’s captain Harry Brook (AP Photo)

Brook saved his most emphatic statement for Shaheen’s final spell. Reading the slower balls early, he launched one over extra cover for six and then drilled another to bring up his maiden T20I hundred off just 50 balls. The innings was a masterclass in modern white-ball batting, blending power with intelligence and elite game awareness.Shaheen eventually castled Brook, who departed to a standing ovation after a knock studded with ten fours and four sixes. By then, the damage was irreparable. Although Nawaz later removed Will Jacks and Jamie Overton in quick succession to bring some spice to the chase, Brook’s brilliance had already sealed the contest.Earlier, Pakistan’s innings in Kandy unfolded in two sharply contrasting halves, with early promise and middle-overs momentum undone by a familiar collapse at the back end, leaving them with a scrappy but competitive 164 for 9 after captain Salman Ali Agha won the toss and opted to bat.The tone was set early by Jofra Archer, whose extra pace and movement made batting an uneasy proposition. There was just enough nibble to keep Pakistan’s openers guessing, and while Saim Ayub never looked comfortable, the real resistance came from Sahibzada Farhan. Farhan rode his luck at times, surviving edges and mistimed pulls, but showed the clarity of intent that has marked his World Cup.Archer accounted for Ayub with a sharp short ball, while England rotated their bowlers smartly through the Powerplay. Pakistan reached 46 for 2, steady rather than explosive, before Farhan began to take control. He drove straight with authority, swept confidently against spin, and used the pace of the bowlers to good effect. His third fifty of the tournament came off just 37 balls, a fluent knock that underlined his growing importance in Pakistan’s batting order.

Pakistan’s Sahibzada Farhan (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardena)

If Farhan was Pakistan’s backbone, Liam Dawson was England’s quiet strangler. Bowling in all three phases, Dawson varied his pace intelligently, firing the ball in flat and quick when batters looked to line him up. His figures of four overs, 24 runs, and three wickets did not fully capture his impact. He removed Salman Ali Agha, dismissed Fakhar Zaman just as he threatened to accelerate, and later surprised Mohammad Nawaz with a darted-in delivery. Each strike stalled Pakistan’s momentum.The defining moment of the innings came with the dismissal of Babar Azam. Struggling to impose himself against spin, Babar’s attempted release shot against Jamie Overton ended in an ugly miscue that signalled the beginning of the slide. From 122 for 3 after 15.3 overs, Pakistan lost six wickets for 27 runs, their innings unravelling under pressure.Farhan was dismissed for a well-made 63 off 45 balls. Despite some late hitting from Shadab Khan, England’s bowlers, backed by Dawson’s control and Archer’s hostility, kept the damage in check.Brief Scores Pakistan: 164 for 9 in 20 overs (Sahibzada Farhan 63, Fakhar Zaman 25; Liam Dawson 3/24, Jamie Overton 2/26, Jofra Archer 2/32) England: 166 for 8 in 20 overs (Harry Brook 100, Will Jacks 28; Shaheen Shah Afridi 4/30, Mohammad Nawaz 2/26, Usman Tariq 2/31)

IBM or International Business Machines Corp had its worst day on stock market in more than 25 years on Monday, February 23. The 100-year-old IT giant saw its market value plunge by billions on fears that a new tool from Anthropic could up-end its dominance of corporate IT. The carnage started after AI startup Anthropic said in a blog post that its Claude Code tool can help modernize COBOL, a dated programming language that’s run on IBM computers. The stock plunged 13% — its biggest single-day percentage loss since October 2000. IBM defended the company’s prospects saying its core mainframe computer business offers a platform that provides the same quality of performance and security for various programming languages and not just COBOL. “The value IBM mainframe delivers has nothing to do with Cobol,” IBM Senior Vice President Rob Thomas wrote in a blog post. “Whether the application is written in COBOL, Java, or any other language, the platform provides the same guarantees. The language is not the source of that value. The platform is.” IBM told Yahoo Finance on the stock market rout, “IBM has been investing in code modernization for years – both through skilling initiatives and through our own generative AI capabilities. More than two years ago, we launched Watsonx Code Assistant for Z (IBM’s mainframe) because we understand the benefit of AI in modernizing code. New AI tools emerge every week, including our own. What they do not change is the fundamental engineering challenge of running mission-critical workloads at scale. Translating COBOL is the easy part. The real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and hardware-accelerated performance built over decades of tight software and hardware coupling. That is the problem IBM has spent decades learning to solve, and AI is the most powerful tool we have ever had to do it.”In a blog post titled, ‘Lost in Translation: What the AI code debate keeps getting wrong’, IBM VP Thomas gave five reasons to stress what the entire AI debate gets wrong about AI coding and the America’s oldest technology company IBM.

Here’s Rob Thomas’ blog post for almost everyone saying a big chunk of IBM business is over as well as that software industry is dead

AI has sparked a new round of conversation about COBOL, with tools emerging that claim to translate legacy code and, with it, solve the modernization challenge. It is worth being precise about what that means and what it does not. Translating code is one thing. Modernizing a platform is something else entirely. The two are not the same, and the gap between them is where most enterprises run into trouble. But the value IBM mainframe delivers has nothing to do with COBOL. It has to do with what the platform is: a purpose-built architecture from silicon through the operating system for unmatched transactional resilience, security, performance, and efficiency at scale that no other distributed environment has been able to deliver. Whether the application is written in COBOL, Java, or any other language, the platform provides the same guarantees. The language is not the source of that value. The platform is. Here is where the translation argument falls short, and why it matters:Translation captures almost none of the actual complexity. The modernization challenge is not a COBOL language problem. It is everything the application runs on and integrates with. Enterprise COBOL on IBM Z sits inside a vertically integrated stack: z/OS, CICS, IMS, Db2, RACF, MQ, Parallel Sysplex, and Cybervault with DS8K Storage. That stack is what enables 25 billion encrypted transactions per day on a single system, 450 billion AI inferences per day at 1ms response time, up to eight nines of availability, quantum-safe encryption, and sustained 100 percent utilization without impacting SLAs. Translating COBOL does not move any of that. The real work is data architecture redesign, runtime replacement, transaction processing integrity, and non-functional requirements baked into the platform itself. That is system-level engineering, not language conversion. Decades of hardware-software integration cannot be replicated by moving code. COBOL on IBM Z is code optimized over decades of tight coupling between software and hardware. An analogy is the iOS and iPhone: someone could build an alternative, but it is unlikely to displace a billion iPhones. The performance derives from tight coupling of software and hardware, processor-level acceleration, I/O subsystem optimization, and decades of performance tuning. AI strengthens the mainframe case, it does not weaken it. Code refactoring, DevOps modernization, knowledge preservation, and quality-of-service improvements are all on-platform opportunities that AI accelerates. It compresses timelines and addresses the skills gap as experienced COBOL developers retire. Each of these is an argument for doing more on IBM Z, not less. SaaS-only solution does not hold up under scrutiny. Given the depth of on-premises dependencies, it is difficult to see how a SaaS-only solution can replace the COBOL applications on the mainframe, meeting the demands of the enterprise. And given everything happening around digital sovereignty and data residency, would an organization make its most critical transactions dependent on a provider operating in a jurisdiction it does not control? Some of this conversation is not about the mainframe. Roughly 40 percent of COBOL runs on Windows, Linux, and other distributed platforms. A large portion of the AI-and-COBOL story is a distributed systems problem that has been folded into a mainframe headline. The two challenges require different approaches and conflating them leads to the wrong solution. The tools that translate COBOL are solving a real problem. Just not the one that matters the most for enterprises running IBM Z. Most of the headlines are about the code, but the engineers doing this work know the code is the starting point, not the destination. What the application runs on, how it scales, how it recovers, how it is encrypted, and how it integrates with everything around it – that is the real modernization work. Understanding that difference is where the work actually starts. This isn’t theoretical. Clients are already proving these points: Royal Bank of Canada – Utilized watsonx Code Assistant for Z to proactively identify dependencies, data flows, structure and organization of existing applications, creating an in-depth blueprint for the modernization and management of changes to core system applications. Learn more. National Organization for Social Insurance – NOSI observed up to a 94% reduction in time to analyze and locate superfluous COBOL code and programmatic routines, reducing the identification time from approximately 8 hours to nearer to 30 minutes using watsonx Code Assistant for Z. Learn more. ANZ Bank – uses modern DevOps tools to reduce manual operations by 60% and accelerate application modernization. Learn more. In summary, the AI debate is real and AI for code will drive substantial value creation, but neither should be lost in translation.

Palghar: The Palghar Police have uncovered an international cyber fraud racket operating from a residential flat in Palghar West, arresting five individuals accused of cheating citizens of the United States. Acting on a tip-off, the Local Crime Branch (LCB) conducted a late-night raid at a flat in Mahim, Palghar, on Monday, where the fake call centre was being operated by 5 people. During the operation, police seized electronic equipment worth about Rs 5.72 lakh, including laptops, mobile phones, headsets, routers and internet devices used to carry out the fraudulent activities.Investigations revealed that the accused allegedly posed as technical support representatives of reputed international technology companies. They reportedly contacted US-based victims, falsely claiming their computers were infected with malware or compromised by hackers. The victims were then tricked into purchasing high-value gift cards under the guise of resolving the fabricated issues.Cops are probing if the fraudulently obtained funds were later converted into cryptocurrency and routed through illegal channels, indicating an organised and well-planned operation. They are also probing the number of people involved in this apart from the five arrested.A case has been registered under relevant sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and the Information Technology Act. The arrested accused were produced before a local court and remanded to police custody. Further investigations are underway to identify additional links and determine the scale of the cyber fraud network.The five accused have been identified as Bharat Lalwani, 35, Mira road resident, Rohit Nimbalkar, 29, Pune, Rohit Zore, 23, Mira road, Amardeep Gill, Bhayander and Sagar Pathadia, Surat resident. They have been remanded to police custody till Feb 28.

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