After their record breaking heroics in the opening match of the series on Friday, England take on the Netherlands again on Sunday knowing that they can seal the spoils with a match to spare, but much more importantly claim the World Cup qualifying points that go with it.
The Netherlands ran into the face of a train on Friday and will be hoping to be able to contain this England side a little better in this game while building some confidence to take to the T20 World Cup qualifier next month.
Netherlands
Clearly it wasn’t the day the Netherlands wanted in the opening match but sometimes you just have to hold your hands up and say the opponents had a day out at the time you least needed it. If you were being extremely critical you could point out that the Dutch side dropped a couple of catches and they proved to be costly but there is so much batting depth in this England team that they’d have kept on hitting big anyway. The end score might have been a bit less but the result would have been the same.
It is evident from the first match that the Netherlands will have to take early wickets in order to contain this England side but even then they are likely to have to score more than 350 if they have any hopes of winning the contest. They didn’t bat too badly in the opening game and now they have seen what they are up against you would imagine they will be a little more confident with the bat in hand. Expect them to bat first if they win the toss this time.
England
We have known for a while that this is a special England team and we got another reminder of it in the opening game of the series. The amazing thing about that record breaking blitz was that it was the first time something close to their main XI had played an ODI for more than a year. Mortals would have had to take a game or two to adjust to the format but this team have it in their DNA to entertain at all times and if you catch them on the wrong day you’re in trouble.
We all know this England team can take any bowling attack to the cleaners on any given day but there is the odd day when they can get themselves in a mess and it tends to come when they compete on used pitches which this one will be. On those occasions they will need their bowlers to rescue them. That is very much the weakest part of the game, especially at the death of the innings, so there might be a chance for a couple of bowlers to make a name for themselves here.
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Team News
I think it goes without saying that the Dutch will make changes for this match and the first one for the bullet is probably Philippe Boissevain who went for more than 100 in the first game. Taking him out of the firing line would make sense and Tim Pringle would look an obvious replacement.
England don’t need to change anything after the first game but you get the impression they haven’t brought an army of left arm seamers onto this trip for most of them to sit back and watch so expect the likes of Luke Wood and David Payne to come into contention. It might be that one plays here and the other plays on Wednesday.
Betting
As you would expect all the runs and sixes and boundaries lines have elevated alarmingly after that opening game. That is completely understandable but what it has done is take away the comfort of backing an over and then the Netherlands batting first and struggling or on the flip side of that backing an under and then England bat first and go ballistic. The truth is this isn’t a match to bet many of the markets until we know the outcome of the toss.
There is one bet which I like the look of though and that comes in the form of a player performance of Bas de Leede. He looked a decent player in the first game to follow up some good form going into this series. In his last six ODIs he has batting scores of 37 and 21 vs New Zealand, 17, 0 and 25 against West Indies and then 28 against England so nothing special but all solid efforts to build on. In those six matches his bowling as yielded 2/46 and 1/34 and we saw in the opening game that he fields in key positions when he took the catch of Dawid Malan. Usually you would expect a 3D cricketer to have a performance line above 30 and pushing 40. Even if you took 10 off for him being an associate player you’ve got something in the 20s. His line is actually 19.5 which means one wicket, two catches or 20 runs or any combination of that gets him home here. I’ve got to take the over.
Tips
Back B.de Leede’s Performance – Over 19.5pts for a 3/10 stake at 1.73 with Bet365
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