The ODI series between Australia and India continues on Thursday when the two sides make their way to Adelaide to battle it out in the middle match of the three, the first chance the hosts have of wrapping up proceedings.
Australia drew first blood in a rain impacted opening match in Perth on Sunday and so a win here will ensure that they win the series before we get Sydney for the final game. India will need to win here in order to make that clash a decider.
Australia
While the T20 matches will be more important than these ODIs in the grand scheme of things given the current schedule, Australia are a proud side in 50 over cricket and will want to showcase just why they are the world champions in this format of the game. They clearly have much bigger fish to fry over the course of their home summer but the personnel on show here will be assigned the task of getting their momentum going for what could be a special four months or so.
Australia were on top from the first new ball spell of Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc and they never relented from there. The rain was certainly a help when they knew what they needed to chase and they got to their target with relative comfort with the conditions certainly not helping the tourists any. Things are expected to be much flatter and calmer here so this might be a bigger test for Australia and a better representation of where they are right now.
India
I guess we should acknowledge that India were always going to be a work in progress on this tour. Their Test series with West Indies finished a matter of days before this white ball tour got underway so anyone who was involved in both were always going to be short of time to adjust to the different country, the changes in conditions and the different format. They have had a few more days to prepare for this second match and you would imagine there is plenty of natural improvement in them as a result of that.
India will know that if they are going to get back into this series then they are going to need to bat a whole lot better than they did in the opening game. Conditions shouldn’t be quite as tricky which will help them but they are still going to go up against a top notch attack so they’ll need to be at their best. India can certainly bowl better but on a drier day in Adelaide you would imagine their bowlers will be able to utilise their skills much more and come to the party.
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Team News
Australia are expected to bring Alex Carey and Adam Zampa into their XI for this match. The former missed the opening game as he was involved in a Sheffield Shield clash while the latter missed out on paternity leave. Josh Philippe and Matt Kuhnemann are likely to make way.
India are expected to make a change to their side with Harshit Rana potentially exiting the team with Prasidh Krishna getting a chance. Kuldeep Yadav is waiting in the wings but while Axar Patel and Washington Sundar are offering batting depth that wait may go on.
Betting
I think this will be a much higher scoring match than the one at Perth. The pace and bounce in this Adelaide pitch is going to be nothing like as stark as in Perth so that should make the India players much more comfortable and as such we should see two extremely good sides battling it out on a pitch where 300 is usually par. The wicket usually gets better the longer the match goes on here as evidenced by the fact that four of the last five ODIs have been won by the team batting second.
The run line for this match is 540.5 which I suspect is a reaction to the opening game but India should come on for the run given that they didn’t have a warm up match and some of their players arrived late into Australia ahead of the series. Australia are going to strengthen their batting and if the new ball doesn’t do as much here, which is expected, then there is nothing to stop the runs flowing in this one. I like over 540.5 runs in this second match.
Tips
Back Over 540.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
