South Africa continue their tour of Sri Lanka with five ODIs and a T20 international over the next few weeks with the first of those 50 over matches taking place in Dambulla in a rare day match on Sunday.
Sri Lanka should have their tails up heading into the series having thrashed South Africa in both Test matches. Those beatings should the Proteas all the motivation they need to find their best cricket in this match.
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Sri Lanka
While it was a different format with a different ball and everything, Sri Lanka will be buzzing from destroying South Africa in the Test matches and they will look to take that into this series. It is important that they continue to bowl well if they are going to come out on top both in this match and ultimately the series.
We should however recognise that Sri Lanka are not a confident one day unit at the minute. That is a surprise because this is a format they have had a huge amount of success in over the last 10 years or so but a lack of consistency in selection has done them no favours at times. That said they have done a good job of introducing young players to the mix and the time will come when they display comfort at this level.
South Africa
The big test for South Africa is to try and forget the nightmare they had in the Test series and use this series as a separate entity. That will not be easy and if they lose early wickets when they bat then those bad memories will no doubt come flooding back but they batted well in the warm up match which will hopefully have given them some confidence.
The other issue for the Proteas batsmen in this series is they all need to step up because they can no longer rely on AB de Villiers to get them out of a mess and to put pressure on the opposition bowlers. It would be a huge lift for them were someone to stand up and take the game on in his absence with next year’s World Cup already in mind.
Team News
Sri Lanka will continue to be without Dinesh Chandimal and Danushka Gunathilaka who are suspended still. Angelo Mathews is fit though and he will skipper the side despite Upul Tharanga being around.
South Africa are set to play two spinners in this match which means that Keshav Maharaj and Tabraiz Shamsi will both feature. Heinrich Klaasen missed the warm up match through injury but could still play a part here.
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Betting
I’m expecting South Africa to be better in this series although in fairness they will be hard pushed to be worse but I’m not yet at the stage where I’m ready to trust them especially now they are without AB de Villiers in this format. Sri Lanka don’t have much positivity about them in this format either so I’m going to ease my way into the series having assessed the first game.
With that in mind I’ll just take a performance for this match which comes in the form of Tabraiz Shamsi. He took four wickets in the only Test he played of the two but we saw in the second game that even though Shamsi didn’t play Sri Lanka are pretty ordinary against spin. With that in mind the line of 27.5 looks very low. Shamsi is a mystery chinaman who Sri Lanka won’t have seen much of still and I think he’s got a couple of wickets in him or even a caught and bowled.
Tips
WON – Back T.Shamsi’s Performance – Over 27.5pts for a 4/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
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