The brief ODI series between Australia and England continues on Saturday when the two sides move from Adelaide to Sydney for the second game of the three, the one which presents the host team with the first of two chances to land the series.
While their motivation for this series is questionable, England know they have to win this second game if they are going to head to Melbourne on Tuesday still in with a chance of taking this series away from Australia as well as the T20 World Cup that they won last week.
Australia
I would imagine Australia will be very happy with their performance in the opening match of the series. They would have been intent on coming out and playing their best cricket and put the bad feelings about their T20 World Cup title defence to bed. They did exactly that but they still left us with the feeling that there might be more to come from them and I always think that is a good position for a team to be in.
Australia will be very pleased with the way they bowled in Adelaide. They only let one batter get away from them and then when faced with a relative test of a run chase they absolutely cruised to victory. The latter part of the match will have pleased them because in their two previous ODI series they hadn’t really flourished with the bat and they never truly convinced in the T20 World Cup either. Some of that was down to the conditions but they would still have wanted a convincing batting effort and they got that.
England
Usually you would say that England would have been disappointed with their effort in the opening game but the fact that half of what you would consider is their strongest side are missing this series, combined with the fact that the opening game was four days after the euphoric highs of winning a global tournament, I suspect they won’t dwell too much on what happened in Adelaide. That doesn’t mean they won’t want to take the series to a decider but they have achieved what they set out to do when they arrived in the country.
England will know they let themselves down a bit with the bat in Adelaide. If someone could just have hung around with Dawid Malan then there is a good chance England would have put a more competitive score on the board but that didn’t happen. Another reason why that didn’t quite happen might have been that they knew they were light with the ball and needed more runs than usual and ultimately paid the price. You would expect some natural improvement in England here for a variety of reasons.
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Team News
There is no need for Australia to make any changes to their side. Sydney tends to offer spin for the bowlers which might keep Ashton Agar in the team even though he didn’t really offer too much in Adelaide. Sean Abbott is waiting for a chance if Agar does drop out.
England decided to rest some of their T20 World Cup heroes in the first game but you would imagine the likes of Moeen Ali and Adil Rashid could return here, potentially in place of Liam Dawson and Olly Stone, the latter of whom won’t have played high intensity matches back-to-back in a while.
Betting
We saw in the T20 World Cup that the Sydney Cricket Ground is a high scoring venue and ODIs played here in recent times have certainly followed that pattern as well. Seven of the last nine first innings scores here have sailed over 300 with the last two going as high as 374/6 and 389/4. On both of those occasions the chasing side also went past 300 so I’m not surprised that the run line for this encounter sits as high as 599.5.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that is covered but there is a scenario where Australia bat first and put up 350 and an unmotivated England don’t chase it down but even in that situation I would expect the boundaries to flow. The last two boundary counts at this venue in ODI cricket have reached 75 and 84 which immediately suggests that a 57.5 line is a touch on the low side. Then when you add in that on a bigger ground in Adelaide in the first game there were 65 boundaries in a match where Jason Roy and Marnus Labuschagne didn’t hit a single boundary and Jos Buttler only hit two there is the potential for even more. England could well strengthen their batting here too which makes me think over 57.5 boundaries is the play in this match.
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