India drew first blood in the T20 series with England on Thursday evening and they will be looking to move two up with one to play when the two sides meet at Edgbaston on what is forecast to be a scorching Saturday afternoon.
England started life under Jos Buttler in pretty ordinary fashion in Southampton on Thursday night and they will be wanting to deliver much more in this match while a reinforced India will be looking to pick up where they left off.
England
You would have to say that it was a pretty poor performance with the bat and the ball by England on Thursday evening. We do need to acknowledge that they are missing a host of players who have been away with the Test squad or are injured, but on paper at least it looked like the XI they named for that first game was more than good enough to perform better than it did. They will be eager to reassert themselves under the leadership of Jos Buttler and it is important that they get an early win under him.
England seemed to be caught by surprise at how hard India came at them at both ends of the innings. We know England have issues at the death with the ball in hand and there was nothing in Southampton that suggested they have resolved those problems. Where you would usually expect a much stronger output from England was with the bat but they were four down pretty early in the piece and they were never winning the match from there. An all-round improvement will be needed here.
India
I would imagine India went into the opening game hoping to compete with England knowing that the cavalry of reinforcements were to arrive for this match. They did much better than compete with England in Southampton, for most of the match they dominated them and that should give them a lot of confidence to take into this match with them, particularly now the reinforcements have arrived and are available for selection.
There were areas where India could improve from that first game though. Their fielding was pretty ordinary and that will be something they want to step up. They also slowed down a little bit after the initial Rohit Sharma burst with the bat but they have the players coming in who can solve that. The crazy thing is that after restricting England to 148 in the first game, their bowling unit is about to get even better!
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Team News
England released Phil Salt to play for Lancashire in the Vitality Blast on Friday evening which suggests he isn’t going to play here. The fact that Richard Gleeson wasn’t released suggests that he will make his debut here. David Willey returns too.
India have five of their Test stars available for selection here with Virat Kohli, Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Ravindra Jadeja and Jasprit Bumrah all in the squad for this one. One change will see Pant replacing Dinesh Karthik while Bumrah and Jadeja are expected to replace Arshdeep Singh and Axar Patel respectively.
Betting
I was at Edgbaston for the Vitality Blast match on Thursday evening and there was a short boundary to the corner of the Hollies Stand and the new pavilion stand which will be even shorter because the pitch for this match was undercover and it is two wickets further along to that side. Hampshire made the boundaries of Thursday evening look pretty small when you consider that even though they are far from the biggest hitting team in the world, they still cleared the ropes on eight occasions.
Unlike Thursday evening, this match has been in the schedule for a while and with the Vitality Blast finals day here next week we were never going to be on the middle of the square anyway. The fact that the pitch is over to one side makes the boundaries very accessible and what I like about these two teams is they have plenty of left and right handers to always have that shorter boundary on the go. Over 12.5 sixes should sail in here, especially when you consider there were 10 sixes on a much bigger ground on Thursday in a match where Jos Buttler, Jason Roy and Liam Livingstone scored four runs between them. I like the over here.
Tips
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