Pakistan and Australia will meet in a deciding match for the second time in little more than a week on Saturday when they play out the third and final ODI in Lahore, one which will determine the outcome of the series.
Australia won a Test decider last week and they’ll look to end this series in the same way. Pakistan aren’t just after the series here but also the World Cup qualifying points that would come with winning the match. This game is wonderfully poised.
Pakistan
Surprisingly Pakistan started this series outside the position that they need to be in to ensure they qualify for the World Cup next year. It didn’t look like that was going to improve much after the opening game where after a good fightback with the ball they were found wanting with the bat. At 1-0 down and facing a run chase of near enough 350 in the second game I think most expected Pakistan to be up against it. To their credit though they chased those runs down and now we have a cracking decider on the cards.
Clearly Pakistan will be disappointed with the amount of runs they have conceded in this series and going forward that is something they need to address. It will be interesting to see if bowling second with weight of runs on the board would help that but bowling second in this part of the world comes with having to deal with the dew so I’m not convinced much would be different. It might be that they need to bat the lights out once again in order to win this series.
Australia
I would imagine when you consider the off-field issues that Australia have had to contend with in terms of managing workloads and then Covid hitting the camp that they will be delighted with how they have performed in the series so far. It is probably stretching it a little that they will be pleased to have given up more than 350 runs in the last game but sometimes the opposition just play really well and that is exactly what happened to them.
Australia were always going to be stretched with the ball in this series even if they had their supposed first choice attack out. We saw they couldn’t extract anything out of the wickets with the red ball so it would have been foolish to think they would with the white one. The second string have plugged away though and stuck to their task. In the main their batters have gone well and they’ll be hoping they have all got one more dance in them.
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Team News
Pakistan aren’t really blessed with options right now but after a win like they had in the previous match I’m not convinced they will be looking to change too much anyway. Shadab Khan misses this final match which doesn’t really help.
Australia have Matt Renshaw out of quarantine now but whether there is a spot for him is another question. The only batter who hasn’t really fired yet is Aaron Finch but he’s the captain so it might be that Australia go in unchanged as well.
Betting
We’ve seen two scores over 300 in the first innings in this series so far and while Pakistan completely lost their way chasing in the first game they certainly didn’t in the second one so I’m expecting plenty of runs in this deciding match as well. There is nothing in the pitches here in Lahore so as long as Pakistan play Adam Zampa like they did in the second match instead of how they played him in the first one then this should be full of runs.
The line has gone up since the opening match to 547.5 but when you consider we’ve just had a match with 700 runs in which Aaron Finch was out first ball there is more than a good chance this line gets covered again. It isn’t like the wickets are wearing here or anything like that and they come onto the bat even more in the second innings so in theory scoring should be even easier then. Given that we had 313/7 in the opening match when Australia should have made 350 and 348/8 in the second I fully expect to have more than 547.5 runs here.
Tips
Back Over 547.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
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