England and West Indies renew battle on Thursday when the two sides head to Nottingham for the second Test match of the scheduled three at Trent Bridge where the home side have the first chance to claim a series win.
England dominated the first match of the series and if they do likewise here they will have claimed it with a game to spare. The equation for West Indies is a simple one. They must win to take it to a decider at Edgbaston next week.
England
When you consider that England do not generally start Test series at their best and that going into this one there was a lot of doom and gloom around after the two failed white ball World Cup campaigns, I would imagine that Ben Stokes and his backroom team would be pretty happy with how the first Test went, particularly when you factor in the emotion around the game with the retirement of Jimmy Anderson and all that went with that.
England were very good in the field. That isn’t always the case early in a series and while the opposition didn’t really put up too much in the way of a challenge, England still had to be ruthless and get the job done and that is exactly what they were. If you were nit picking then you would suggest that they would like some more runs in their first innings but with five more matches left this summer there is plenty of time for that to happen.
West Indies
I think it is fair to say that we would have been wrong to expect the best version of West Indies in the opening Test match when you consider the indifferent preparation they had for the series. They only had one warm up match, had to miss a couple of starters for that because of the travel issues with the hurricane back home and then their training in the lead up to the game was truncated because of the rain that was around London so none of that was ideal.
Even so, they would probably have been looking for a better showing than the one that they gave at Lord’s and they will certainly be aiming to produce more in this match. There aren’t no excuses here. They have had a run out and the weather leading up to this game has been good enough so they can go out and perform. We said it before the series but if West Indies are even just going to be competitive in these matches they have to bat well, and much better than they did at Lord’s. Their bowlers didn’t do too badly but the batting failed twice.
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Team News
England have confirmed their XI for this match and it includes one change from the side which won at Lord’s, as we knew it would. Jimmy Anderson is now a thing of the past and Mark Wood will be the man coming in to replace him.
West Indies have made the somewhat surprising decision to name an unchanged side from the one which went down at Lord’s which suggests that the back up players either aren’t very good or aren’t ready to come in.
Betting
I’ll go with just the one bet over the course of the match and it comes in the form of the Alzarri Joseph performance which looks to have a very low line at 55.5 even allowing for the possibility that he only bowls in one innings. He only managed 45 points in the first game of the series but you could tell from an early stage that he needed the run out so I would expect the West Indies bowler to be a whole lot better on a ground where the natural swing conditions might suit him.
The one thing we did see in the first Test, not that we didn’t already know it, is that Joseph can bat and it might be that he wipes out a decent chunk of this total with the bat alone. If he scored just 16 runs in the two innings we would only need him to take two wickets to cover this line. It might be that West Indies bowl first and he gets to bowl twice but I don’t think a couple of wickets and 16 runs are beyond him however this one plays out.
Tips
Back A.Joseph’s Performance – Over 55.5pts for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
