Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Much-awaited clash sees India take on England

Lord’s will host the first Test of four that India will play in England this summer. It is expected to be a humdinger of a match, but a lot will still depend on the pitch and the weather. Both teams, the fans and the organisers will hope that the weather does not spoil the show as this first Test match is special for a number of reasons.

As almost everyone will know, this will be the 2,000^th Test match and the 100^th between these two countries. Sachin Tendulkar is just one century away from recording a hundred hundreds and if the hosts can outwit the Indians in this match, it will give them a good shot at overtaking India as the best Test team according to the ICC rankings.

This Test match will also be the first to feature the Castrol Index in the longest format of the game, part of Castrol’s continuing commitment to the sport.

India will see several big names return to the side for the first time since the World Cup. While Virender Sehwag might not be fit enough until the third Test, Tendulkar, Gautam Gambhir, Yuvraj Singh, Sreesanth and Zaheer Khan are all back in the squad. A less-experienced Indian team was still able to defeat the West Indies, but England are a different kettle of fish.

The host nation has won seven out of their last eight Test series, with one drawn, and they are going to be far from pleasant for the Indians to face. Stuart Broad has not been in the best of form with the ball, but England as a whole show few weaknesses. Their captain, Andrew Strauss, has had a tough time of it of late, but did put in a good performance in a warm-up match against India in the last few days. He is known to have a particular weakness to left-arm seamers, including Zaheer, but he will have certainly been working to overcome that particular bother in the nets.

India are riding high on confidence and will be pushing for victory. They are still the best Test team, but will face a tough challenge on this tour. Thankfully for them, they have a truly enviable bunch of players in Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman, backed up by some interesting bowlers, and with MS Dhoni at the helm. This should all make for a very intriguing series, especially in the first Test.

Friday, July 08, 2011

It’s the deciding match between England and Sri Lanka

The preceding four ODIs have not been closely-fought contests, with both sides winning comfortably on two occasions each. Much of that has to do with the conditions that those games were played in. England benefited from two cloudy days in their two wins, on livelier wickets that helped their pace attack. The sun shone in Sri Lanka’s wins and may do so again in Manchester for the final match.

But they will be coming off a 10-wicket mauling by the English in the last match. Alastair Cook has had a good outing in this series with the bat, scoring an unbeaten 95 in the last game, following on from his century, albeit in a losing cause, in the third. He is now the leading run-scorer in the series with 267 runs, 30 more than former Lankan captain Mahela Jayawardena.

The current captain of the tourists, Thillakaratne Dilshan, is struggling for form, however, having made just 13 in four outings. Vice captain Thilina Kandamby is also finding it hard to score runs in the series and may face competition for his spot in the final ODI.

Pace bowler Suranga Lakmal might also miss out thanks to injury, so we could see a different Lankan side taking to the field for the deciding encounter. England, conversely, are likely to remain unchanged. There were quite a few doubts about Stuart Broad’s performance, after going wicketless in the first three games, but he took two in the fourth ODI.

This series has been an important one for both sides. England are widely regarded to be much better in Tests than in the one-day game, and they now have a new one-day captain in Cook, who was appointed after England had a less than spectacular World Cup. Sri Lanka, too, have a new captain and this is the first real test for the ODI team after finishing runners-up during the World Cup, where they knocked out England in the quarter-finals. All things considered, then, it should be a great contest between these two island nations.