Australia Lick Their Lips At The Thought Of A One-Sided Series

 

 

Ashes 2013

 

England up against it in the ODIs

 

September 5^th

 
 

[10:00 CEST] England’s helter-skelter international summer continues. Although not everyone at Cricket Ireland was impressed, England had to press on from Dublin to their next international assignment in Leeds tomorrow. Travel, settle in, practice, play, move on to Manchester. The 3^rd and the 5^th ODIs (Birmingham and Southampton) are going to be day-nighters: there may not be too many volunteers to field on the boundary at the end of the last match as temperatures drop towards freezing and limbs seize up if you are not moving around constantly.

Pietersen, Root and Trott will join the squad, which probably means that Ballance will not get a chance to make up for his nervous debut. James Taylor will also probably miss out. The attack looked a bowler light against Ireland. For all his explosive batting, Luke Wright’s bowling is not good enough at this level. One option might be to give Chris Jordan a game. The squad is not blessed with much bowling depth and it looks like it does depend on Ravi Bopara bowling a full, or nearly full spell in most games but, if he gets attacked, England are left very exposed: playing Jamie Overton, who can be very wild, would be a huge risk and there are not too many other options in the squad.

Australia are ranked #2 and England #3 in the ICC ODI rankings, so one would expect a close series but, the feeling seems to be that England will be lucky to win more than one game. In particular, the winners of the Test series tend to relax and do poorly in the ODIs that follow. Australia are supremely confident going into the series and there is a very real sense that they want to show that the result of the Test series was a travesty of justice by winning the ODIs big. It may be this overconfidence that is England’s best chance of winning the series. However, with very limited bowling depth, the weakness that Australia will want to exploit is England’s 4^th and 5^th bowler options: if they do that successfully it could be a massacre.