New Zealand captain Mitchell Santner has won the toss and elected to bowl first in the fifth T20I against India. The game will start at 12:30 pm IST.

Toss Decision – Captains’ comments and reasoning

“We will bowl first. It is the new pitch. It is going to be challenging on a small ground, and you have to adapt quickly. If the wicket is flat, we have the batting depth. We have been good in the whole series in the batting department, but we need to bowl well,” Mitchell Santner said.

India skipper Shreyas Iyer would have batted if he had won the toss. He wants to test his batters as the team bowled first in the previous four games of the series.

“It’s a great occasion to come here. We wanted to bat first. We want to test ourselves, as we chased in the previous four games. The dimensions were different in the last game, but we need to give credit to Phillips. It is important to bowl according to plans. Varun and Bhuvi come in. Varun has been waiting for a chance, and he gave a beautiful speech in the team huddle,” he said.

Playing XIs

New Zealand: 1 Finn Allen, 2 Tim Seifert (wk), 3 Daryl Mitchell, 4 Glenn Phillips, 5 Bevon Jacobs, 6 Michael Bracewell, 7 Mitchell Santner (capt), 8 Nathan Smith, 9 Adam Milne, 10 Jacob Duffy, 11 Blair Tickner

India: 1 Abhishek Sharma, 2 Sanju Samson, 3 Ishan Kishan (wk), 4 Shreyas Iyer (capt), 5 Tilak Varma, 6 Nitish Kumar Reddy, 7 Naman Dhir, 8 Bhuvneshwar Kumar, 9 Arshdeep Singh, 10 Prince Yadav, 11 Varun Chakravarthy