We roll back the years in Pakistan on Saturday when an ODI tri-series containing them as hosts, New Zealand and South Africa gets underway in Lahore with the three sides looking to complete their Champions Trophy preparations.
The series begins with Pakistan taking on New Zealand in what is the last chance for the hosts to try things out before naming their Champions Trophy squad. New Zealand have one more match after this but will be keen to tie down a starting XI.
Pakistan
Pakistan actually go into this series and indeed the Champions Trophy which follows this one in pretty decent form in the 50 over format. They have won their last three series which includes a sweep of the three matches that they played in South Africa just prior to Christmas and they will be looking to kick on from there and lay down a genuine challenge at the global tournament in which they host the majority of later in the month.
This is Pakistan cricket though and things are never that easy and they are going to be forced into changes from the side which won in South Africa, not least because of injury, but also because conditions here are going to be much different to the ones they faced there. The attention will be on the Pakistan batting in these matches. In South Africa they put up 329 and 308/9 batting first and those are the sorts of scores that they are going to need here.
New Zealand
It has been a complete contrast for New Zealand in recent times. They haven’t paid too much attention to this format in the last 12 months apart from a couple of series against Sri Lanka, one away from home which they lost 2-0 and one at home which they were 2-1 winners in last month but with the Sri Lankans having failed to qualify for the Champions Trophy it remains to be seen just how much we can take from those matches.
The one thing we can take is that this is a New Zealand bowling unit that is in transition, especially in the seam bowling ranks where Trent Boult and Time Southee are a thing of the past having been mainstays for the last decade or more. The other thing we know is that the batting, while probably the strongest suit these days, does have one or two holes in it that don’t need to be exposed if the Kiwis are going to win the Champions Trophy.
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Team News
It looks like Babar Azam is going to return to open the batting for Pakistan alongside the back in favour Fakhar Zaman. The latter has been bashing attacks in the ILT20 tournament recently. Shaheen Afridi is set to lead a strong bowling unit.
New Zealand would have been wanting to call on the pace of Lockie Ferguson for this match but he pulled up in the ILT20 competition earlier in the week and is expected to miss out so Jacob Duffy, who was initially called up to cover Ferguson while he was involved in the UAE, might well go into the side.
Betting
Since cricket returned to Pakistan a decade ago there have been nine ODIs at the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore and runs have often been the order of the day. Four of the nine first innings have seen the team batting pile up over 300 and then another two have been more than 290 so even though some renovation work has been done at the ground ahead of the Champions Trophy I think we have to use a high scoring game as a starting point for this match.
The run line for this match is 550.5 so if we assume the chasing side win the game, which wouldn’t be the biggest assumption in the world given that dew is likely to come in during the second innings, then we are looking at 275 in the first innings of the match and on a relatively small ground where the pitch is usually very good for batting that doesn’t seem like too big an ask. Both bowling units have been playing a lot of T20 cricket recently and you often find that attacks need a game to get up to bowling more than one spell which helps the batters so I think the over is a good thing here. Since cricket returned to Pakistan this total has landed in half of the games and two which didn’t involved Zimbabwe and Bangladesh. I like the over here.
Tips
Back Over 550.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
