 After Sri Lanka had got the better of Pakistan in the first game
of the five match ODI series, it will be the turn of the visitors to try and rule
the roost in the second game of the series at Dambulla. And for that to
happen, Pakistan needs to play with a lot more discipline and bat with a lot more
intent. Click for Live Score Card of Sri Lanka vs Pakistan
Pakistan will have serious thinking to be done about their batting line-up.
There were at least two batsmen who could have made it to the final eleven,
but for some reason were held back by the team management. Imran Nazir
and Umran Akmal were the duo who did not make it to playing eleven despite
many of the experts thinking otherwise. Nazir, for one, is highly talented,
and an explosive batsman, who can take any attack apart and will do good to
get in as an opener, even at the expense of Shoaib Malik.
On the other hand, Akmal is a 19-year old brother of Kamran Akmal -
the wicket-keeper - and had shown enough form in the opening warm-up game in
the lower order to merit a case. Whether Pakistan want to blood him as early
as this is a definite question mark.
To me, Misbah-ul-Haq's form is a little worrying, what with his inability to
either score the boundaries after the Powerplay overs or even rotate the strike
and there is a more than reasonable chance that he will be shown the door. The
rest of the line-up should remain fairly intact, as the bowlers had done a decent
job till Murali's great innings to restrict the hosts.
Sri Lanka is a team which no longer relies on Murali to pick up bucketful of
wickets in the fifty overs format. Instead, they usually have a variety of spinners
bowling at the other hand, choking, throttling or strangulating the opposition
and leading them to batting suicides. However, this time around, starting with
the test series, it has been the medium pace bowlers, who have been making all
the moves.
Nuwan Kulasekera and Thilan Thushara had done exceedingly well in the
test series preceding this, and broke the back of the Pakistani top-order in
the first ODI too. The batsmen have been clueless against the swing that Kulasekera
has been afforded by the strange looking Lankan tracks, and the bounce that
Thushara has been able to generate.
On the other hand, the Sri Lankan batsmen will need to try and settle down
more before playing their shots. The pitch does not look like it is one to go
after the bowling even after one has reached one's 20s and 30s and the batsmen
will do well to remember this.
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