By Ian Botham
There is a lot of speculation about the England ODI team and how they will fare against India in this format. But aren’t the England side the number one ODI team at the moment?
Honestly the warm-up games, which England lost, don’t mean anything. They help the team to get accustomed to the conditions and I don’t read much into the results.
The team in bother at the moment is India. Right from MS Dhoni’s leadership to Duncan Fletcher’s role as a coach, there are a lot of questions that are being asked. The English team would be looking forward to take advantage of those factors.
The Indian batting display was pretty ordinary against Pakistan and they were very close to a 3-0 whitewash. Like Pakistan, England, too, will look to exploit that. England are the second best Test side at the moment and they possess a fine bowling attack. We saw how the Indian batsmen struggled against them in the Test series and I see no reason why the English bowlers won’t be able to replicate that against the struggling Indian batting.
Batting will be an area on which much of England’s success in this series will depend on.
If the batsmen can support the bowlers, then beating this Indian team won’t be a very difficult task. I think batting will be an area which will decide the outcome of this series. The Indian selectors have included Cheteshwar Pujara in the side to strengthen their batting and the axe fell on Virender Sehwag.
I am not surprised by this decision; Sehwag has looked very ordinary in the last few innings and hasn’t been consistent at all.
It is very important for an opener to lend solidity at the top order, but unfortunately he hasn’t been delivering, which has hurt India. Though the decision doesn’t surprise me, I would have still picked him for this series and dropped him from the Test squad.
A run of a few games might have helped him regain some form. There are other batsmen as well who haven’t been getting runs and I hope the change in the batting order helps India.
As far as England are concerned, I am pretty happy with the team. Rotating players is vital in order to keep them fit. There is a series in New Zealand coming up followed by the Ashes, so it’s a good decision by the selectors to rest some of the key bowlers.
The new format seems pretty interesting, but it’s too early to make a judgement. There have been only a few matches played and as this series progresses we will find out more on what impact it has on this format.
All told, I’m really looking forward to another series of close encounters.