It is the penultimate match in the T20 series between India and England on Friday when the two sides head to Pune for the fourth game of the scheduled five, the second of which India have the chance to securing the spoils.
A win for India here and they will have the series wrapped up before we get to the final game on Sunday but if England can come out on top then they will take the five game series to a deciding match in Mumbai.
India
India have already had one chance to win this series but made a bit of a mess of it. For the third time in this series they were bowling first and kept England to a manageable total but they couldn’t get going with the bat at all. That was a bit of a concern because there doesn’t look to be too many more obvious selections for them to utilise with the bat. In conditions which should have been good for chasing it was a poor effort and they will want much more here.
The good thing for India is that their bowlers look to be all over England in this series. They let Liam Livingstone get away from them a little in the last game but to be fair to them he was in a position where he could swing from the hip without too much fall back such was the position that England were in at the time. Even so, when they have England in the trouble that they had them in, India would probably prefer their bowlers to be a little more ruthless than they were.
England
With their backs firmly against the wall, England were able to bounce back and keep the series alive with a very good win in the third game of the series and now they will be all out to force a decider at the Wankhede at the weekend which could see conditions return to their favour. England had to do it the hard way in Rajkot but to their credit even when things looked like they were getting away from them they were able to dig in, put up a score which they had a chance of defending and then successfully defended it.
The good thing about this England team, and something that will make them very dangerous moving forward while Brendon McCullum is their coach, is that they go searching for wickets with the ball. They know the only way of keeping scores down in international cricket is to get deep into the batting order and they were able to do that. They are going to need competitive scores on the board in order for that to happen but if they can produce those regularly then they could be a really good side.
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Team News
It sounds like Rinku Singh is fit again and could come back into the side for this one although whether India give him a couple more days so that he is fit for a deciding match should it come along remains to be seen. Dhruv Jurel is the most likely man to be replaced.
England are expected to bring Jacob Bethell back into their starting XI for this match. There is a suggestion that Jamie Smith is injured but if he is passed fit then Bethell could replace one of Jamie Overton or Brydon Carse to lengthen the batting order.
Betting
When the series started I was expecting a high scoring affair but we haven’t really had one of those yet and I’m not convinced that we are going to get one here either. England have struggled against the spin throughout the series and on this Pune pitch you would imagine nothing is going to change in that regard. In the opening three matches England’s figures against spin have been 12-1-67-5, 14-0-118-6 and 13-0-108-7 so in the series that is 39-1-293-18 so they are scoring at 7.51 per over.
If India bowl the average of 13 overs of spin and go at that rate again then that will be around 100 runs so it is hard to see an England innings containing 180 runs because the seamers aren’t exactly going around the park. India aren’t exactly going much better against spin. They are only going at 5.60 per over against Adil Rashid in this series and 8.00 against Liam Livingstone so if we average those out to 6.8 then their eight overs will go for 55 which means that 21 overs of spin will go for somewhere between 155-160 runs. You can get a run line of 365.5 for this match which means on those averages the other 19 overs would need to go for between 205-210 which is unlikely and that is assuming all of the overs get bowled. So far in the series the run totals have been 265, 331 and 316. The under looks a good thing here.
Tips
Back Under 365.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365