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...

Saturday night's match saw a match-winning knock from the rather heavy bat of Jonny Bairstow. I've spoken here before about how we have plenty of young talent coming through the ranks and this guy is one of the most promising players from England's next generation of stars. I first came across him when I was still at Yorkshire. He was still a very young lad at the time but already he could hit the ball a lot further than anyone else at the county. What I like about him is that he tries to hit the ball straight rather than swinging across the line, which is always a temptation, particularly amongst the more inexperienced players. But he's also dead quick running between the wickets and has taken a couple of pretty sharp catches at important times of matches. Even more promisingly, he ...

Kevin Pietersen is on a roll. Having gone 38 ODI innings without a century, spread over three years, he scored his second in two matches yesterday. And if his ton on Sunday felt a bit like a pressure-free exhibition of batting given the nature of the run-chase, yesterday's was a proper match-winning innings with England really up against it for the majority of the chase. It was almost a case of 'KP versus Pakistan' and maybe that's when he's at his best. I'm sure he'd tell you that was one of the most satisfying knocks he's ever played in ODI cricket. Maybe the penny has dropped with Kevin Pietersen and he's worked out how to score an ODI ton as an opener. I never managed to do that. I either opened or batted at three and got to 50 often enough but, after that, I wasn't really sure how...

So England are 3-0 up and whatever happens in the last match, they will have gone some way to avenging that whitewash in the Test series. Make no mistake about it though: England will be desperate to finish this series on a high and make it 4-0. It obviously helps when you've had a centurion in each of your three matches but the difference between the two sides in my opinion has been the bowling. Steve Finn has been superb and Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Graeme Swann have also been very impressive. Samit Patel and Ravi Bopara have done their jobs too. At the moment I wouldn't take anyone's bowling attack over England's. And it's not just about those guys who are playing at the moment. Monty Panesar hasn't been involved in the ODIs despite playing really well in the Tests and ...

I've said already that I don't expect this ODI series to be any easier for England than the Test series was. It will be played on the same pitches, a lot of the Pakistan players will be the same and spin will still be the name of the game. You can read my thoughts ahead of the whole series here. But the one big different element England will have to contend with is Shahid Afridi. Say what you like about him: that he's too erratic, too excitable, too much of a risk-taker or too flamboyant. But he's also one of those players who has the ability to single-handedly win a match for you. He seems to do it less and less with the bat these days, which is ironic because it was as an explosive opener that he first made his name. He' still got the potential to guide his team home with a few flashes...

The Test series was a rude awakening for England but they get a chance to try and redeem themselves with this four-match ODI series. If we're looking for positives then we can say that some of the England batsmen who now take to the limited-overs format should know how to play the likes of Saeed Ajmal and Abdur Rehman by now. One of the guys who really struggled against them, Ian Bell, has been dropped and there are some new guys like Jos Butler, Steven Davies and Ravi Bopara coming in who may not have played against those guys before but then again, won't have nightmares about what happened in the Test matches to haunt them. Kevin Pietersen is opening the batting just like he did at the World Cup and that's a good move. Firstly because he's probably still England's most dangerous player...

First things first. Just about anyone and everyone who has an opinion on cricket has been very quick to rubbish England's performance in the Second Test and that's fair enough. But let's not forget one thing: Andrew Strauss' men were awful for a session and a half on day four but they weren't actually that bad for the rest of the Test. They put themselves in a winning position and they traded very low in-play on Betfair when chasing a small target. England may have blown a great chance to level the series but it's not like they were under cosh for the whole of the match so we need to remember that before calling it an all-round dreadful performance. There was nothing disappointing about this column's tips though, with an initial lay of the draw at 2.2 and a mid-match back of Pakistan...

A cricket dressing room is a great place to be in when you're winning but a pretty miserable one when you've just been hammered. There will have been plenty of soul-searching amongst the England players as to what went wrong and plenty of work done by analysts and other background staff into why their batting line-up capitulated not once, but twice. No prizes for guessing which Pakistan bowler will have been the subject of the greatest amount of analysis. If England don't play Saeed Ajmal a lot better than they did in the First Test they're in big trouble but hopefully all this fancy technical equipment will help them work out where they went wrong last time. Chris Tremlett isn't fully fit so will miss out, although I suspect the Surrey paceman wouldn't have played anyway, even if he...

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...