mvaughan

It's no surprise to see Graeme Swann head the England top series bowler market at around 2.8. After all, as a spinner he's more likely to bowl more overs than anyone else and these are turning pitches out in the UAE. Or are they? Whereas I expect these wickets to deteriorate by days four and five and for the spinners on both sides to have plenty of fun on them at that stage, I think it will the seamers doing the vast majority of the work for the first three days. And they'll get two bites of the cherry. They can be extremely dangerous with the new ball especially if there's a bit of morning dew in the wicket and then again when the ball is around 30 overs old and starts to reverse swing. Something that Stuart Broad, Chris Tremlett and James Anderson all have in their locker. Of these...

The likes of [b]Alastair Cook[/b] and Jonathan Trott will be glad to be home already. They got absolutely thrashed in the ODI series and I'm sure they won't have been in the mood for a one-off T20 match against an Indian side high on confidence and littered with in-form players. The irony of it is that it's England, not India, who are the T20 World Champions and the number one ranked side in the world. But we must put that into context. For starters England have played very few T20 matches in the sub-Continent and if their ODI record is anything to go by, if they'd played many more I'm not sure that they would be top of the pile. Then we need to remember the manner of England's World Cup win. They played the whole tournament with virtually the same XI (they had no injuries) and chased...

[b]Mahela Jayawardene[/b] reminded us of what an outrageous talent he is with that scintillating knock at Headingley that set up a convincing win for [b]Sri Lanka[/b] on Friday. He's obviously in great form at the minute, but he's not the only one. I correctly predicted Sri Lanka would win at 2.4, that Jayawardene would top score for the tourists at 5.0 and that England's opening partnership would pass the 30 run mark at 2.0 before losing their first wicket. If the current [b]England ODI side[/b] were picked on tipping results rather than cricket form I think I'd be due a recall! The key to working out how the remaining matches in this ODI Series are going to go is assessing what sort of a wicket they're going to be playing on in the next three games. We saw that when the ball is ...