Kohli's 74 and a Young Pace Pack Give India the Auckland Opener Under DLS

Rain kept interrupting at Eden Park, and every interruption made the same point. This was India's game, played at India's pace, and the weather only changed the arithmetic. New Zealand were bowled out for 185 in 40.2 overs, the chase was trimmed to a Duckworth-Lewis-Stern target of 143 from 32 overs, and India reached it in 22.4 overs, five wickets down and 56 balls to spare, to open the five-match series with a win.

Shubman Gill won a rain-delayed toss and chose to bowl, backing a pace attack short on caps and long on energy. The faith was repaid in full. Arshdeep Singh took 4 for 70, Gurnoor Brar took 3 for 44, and Anshul Kamboj produced the spell of the match, 2 for 22 from ten overs that squeezed the life out of the middle overs and earned him Player of the Match. New Zealand never built a stand that stuck. Tim Seifert made 38, and only Blair Tickner's late hitting, 34 with four sixes, dragged the total anywhere near respectability. A score of 185 was never going to be enough unless the chase fell apart completely.

For one over, it threatened to. Rohit Sharma fell for a duck in the first over, and Eden Park stirred. Then Virat Kohli walked in and switched the match off. Kohli and Gill added 113 for the second wicket, the captain playing the anchor with 37 off 56 balls while Kohli did the damage at the other end. His 74 came off 51 balls, with 13 fours and a six, and his fifty arrived in just 35 deliveries. Two rain breaks reset the target while he was at the crease, and neither disturbed him. Jacob Duffy, who took 3 for 49, eventually removed both set batters late on, but by then the chase was a formality.

There was history folded into the innings, too. Kohli became the first batter to score 13,000 ODI runs batting at number three, and he moved past Sachin Tendulkar as the highest run-scorer in ODI run chases. Records tend to attach themselves to Kohli in chases because he treats them as a job specification rather than a bonus. A revised target, a damp outfield, an early wicket down: none of it changed his tempo, and that calm remains India's greatest asset in this format.

The bigger story for India might be who was not there. With senior quicks rested, a young pace unit owned the first innings on a ground where visiting attacks often get punished. If Kamboj, Gurnoor Brar and Auqib Nabi Dar keep bowling like this, the selection debates for the rest of this series will be the pleasant kind. The second ODI is in Wellington on Saturday, and New Zealand already know the size of the task in front of them.