mvaughan

First and foremost let's hope that this Series isn't spoilt by the weather. These are two really good teams up against each other and it would be a massive disappointment if we don't have enough play to establish who is the better of the two right now. Light showers are expected on Thursday and Friday but it's meant to be a lot better over the weekend. The pitch at the Oval is normally a good one and the news is that it will be a dry track that will offer plenty for the spinners late on in the match. That means that whereas it would normally be an idea to bowl first if you win the toss, both captains will be thinking that chasing any sort of score to win the game will be hard work. So win the toss and bat is probably the wise choice. Graeme Swann and Imran Tahir will be major players...

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...

I'm afraid to say the First Test has gone pretty much as predicted in my preview of it. I say afraid because as an ex-England captain, seeing my team getting skittled out for 192 in the first innings isn't exactly what I wanted to see happening. Still, I'm here on Betting.Betfair as an analyst and tipster rather than as a fan so hopefully you will have followed my advice of backing Pakistan at 3.9 with a view to laying tem off at a shorter price in-play. Two days of cricket must lead us to one extremely obvious conclusion: Saaed Ajmal is not only the key to this Test, he's likely to be the most important man throughout the whole series. If England can't handle him they'll lose this Test and conceivably one or two more. The fact they've found the spinner so hard to face doesn't come as...

All in all this should be a fascinating series. We know that England are virtually unbeatable in their own conditions where the ball swings and we know they can also be extremely efficient on slightly harder and faster tracks like those they encountered in Australia last winter. But here in the UAE they will be faced with conditions that they don't know well and adapting them to quickly will the latest challenge facing Andrew Strauss' side. And not just against any old team. Not only are Pakistan the most-improved side in Test cricket over the past year or so but they will actually feel like they're playing at home given that most of the cricket they've played over the past two years has been right here, because of the ICC's ban on them hosting international matches on home soil. Key...

I've spoken already about how I think India will be a little under-cooked coming into the First Test after having played just the one three-day warm-up match. I'll make no apologies for constantly talking about playing in 'English conditions' throughout this series but we simply can't under-estimate how different they are to conditions found anywhere else in the world. If Test cricket is almost a different game to One-Day Internationals for example, so is playing in conditions that are alien to certain teams. Especially when that team is India. Back home they're used to playing on some of the flattest wickets in the world where the ball simply doesn't misbehave and provided you're in good nick and don't do anything stupid, you can score big and score quickly. Not so over here. Take...

When looking at the most likely winner of a Test series we need to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides when it comes to the three disciplines of batting, bowling and fielding. To this I'll add an assessment of who has the better captain. In limited-overs cricket the skipper has far less time to think on his feet and requires a quick brain but in Test cricket you need to get the big decisions right. Bat or bowl? Enforce the follow-on or bat again? Take the new ball or hope the old one starts to reverse swing? In Test cricket he needs to be at the very least 10 overs ahead of the game and he's often the man who can sway the game one way or another through his decision-making at crunch time. On paper India have the better batting-line up. Heck, two of their batters - Sachin...