mvaughan

[u]The sub-continent[/u] Sri Lanka, currently trading at 6.4, will enjoy playing in their own conditions and having seasoned campaigners like Tillekeratne Dilshan, Kumar Sangakkara, Mahela Jayawardene and Lasith Malinga in the side will be invaluable. I was concerned about their lack of a mystery spinner in a post-Murali world, but the emergence of Akila Dhananjaya looks to have filled that gap and they will be right up there. I like the look of them at 6.4. India are trading as 6.2 favourites and I wouldn't discourage getting involved at that price. A knockout match at a T20 World Cup is a high-pressure situation and the experience of playing year-on-year-out in the IPL will certainly help their players. They have an embarrassment of riches to pick from and you know that under MS...

England are in a prime position to win this match, simple as that. I've never really had any concerns about the bowling; you'll have read me in this column saying England have the best Test bowling attack in the world. It's not often anyone scores more than 300 in a Test match against this bowling attack these days. The problem in recent months is that England have seldom come anywhere near to scoring that themselves! This time it looks like it's going to be a very different story. Andrew Strauss and Alastair Cook went out with a good game-plan concerning the sort of run rate they were targeting and what they considered to be their scoring areas. Strauss will have been disappointed to not have gone on and scored 100 but him and Cook have set up a good platform and the middle-order...

England will ring the changes ahead of the Second Test, a match they need to win to level the Series and stop the rot. The first is an enforced one with Steve Finn the natural replacement for the injured Stuart Broad. Finn did well in the ODI matches against Pakistan, which were played on a similar sort of wicket to the one he'll find at Galle so there's no reason why he can't be successful again here. I'm also expecting Monty Panesar to give way with Tim Bresnan coming in for him. With all due respect to Monty, Bresnan is the far better fielder and batsman and will take Broad's place at eight with Finn probably batting down at eleven. Unlike in Galle, there won't be a breeze in Colombo so bowling quickly will be even more hard work than it was last week - a three-man pace attack looks ...

First things first. I've got no problem with the way England went about picking their XI. They chose the side that they thought gave them the best chance of winning the match and Samit Patel bowled well, taking two wickets on Test debut, which is a decent return. He misjudged the flight of a good delivery when he was batting but didn't look out of his depth at any stage. He didn't fare any worse than most of the England's batting order. England's problems lay elsewhere. Firstly they let Sri Lanka off the hook last night - Monty Panesar twice dropping Mahela Jayawardene, who cashed in after being given two lifelines. You wouldn't expect any less from a player of his calibre. We'll have to wait and see just how important those extra runs he scored will be but they could end up making all...

England were humiliated in the Test series against Pakistan. They went in as favourites and got whitewashed. But this isn't a team who will let defeat dent their confidence. They'll see this challenge as an opportunity to set the record straight and prove they can win a Test series outside England. After all, they're not the number one ranked team in the world for nothing. The exclusion of Eoin Morgan from the squad is no great surprise. He's had plenty of chances in the longest format and hasn't really taken them so it's now up to him to go away, work on his game, learn from his mistakes and play well enough for Middlesex to win a recall to the Test team. James Tredwell's inclusion isn't a massive shock either. England are likely to play two spinners and, if either Graeme Swann or Monty...

One of the major reasons as to why England have been so successful over the last three or four years has been the form of Graeme Swann. He was an integral part of the side that won back-to-back Ashes series and the last T20 World Cup. He's a classic example of a late bloomer in the international game. He had a tough time at Northamptonshire in the early part of his career. Everyone seemed to acknowledge his talent but for whatever reason he never really kicked on and only very rarely showed glimpses of the match-winning spinner he could be. His move to Nottinghamshire, after Monty Panesar came onto the Northamptonshire scene, was probably the best career move he ever made and proof that county cricketers sometimes just need to move on elsewhere to better themselves as players. Chris ...

On a good wicket at Lord's Sri Lanka found batting a lot easier than England did. They were also far more disciplined with the ball while showing greater imagination in terms of varying the lengths and pace at which they were bowling. As is so often the case, Lasith Malinga was at times unplayable while most of the other pace bowlers on the day were just getting increasingly frustrated at getting no assistance from a docile pitch. But none of this came as a surprise to us really. In the build-up to the match we talked about how Sri Lanka would prefer a good wicket at Lord's to the track they got at The Oval. The likes of Mahela Jayawardene and Kumar Sangakkara normally cash in on these wickets, even though this time it was youngster Dinesh Chandimal who top scored. England need to learn...

Not many people in England will have known too much about Dinesh Chandimal prior to Sunday's match at Lord's, but they certainly do now. Chasing a decent score at just about the most famous ground in the world, the young Sri Lankan batsman went about his business with a calm head and scored a superb match-winning century. He was peppered with some short deliveries, mostly by Stuart Broad (who perhaps overdid it a tad), but he weathered that storm and scored quickly against most of the other England bowlers. He has a good technique, looks solid in defence and can play both orthodox cricket shots as well as improvised strokes that may look a little odd, but are highly effective. He hit a couple of big sixes and found the boundary rope with regularity in those crucial middle overs to assist...

[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 ...