 West Indies play Sri Lanka at Trent Bridge in a game whose result will
have no bearing on how the tournament progresses from here. Both West Indies
and Sri Lanka have already qualified for the Super Eights and Australia,
the third team in the group has already been knocked out of the competition.
Both teams may have qualified for the next round, but neither will want to
lose out on the momentum and hence should go into the game at full strength
with an intention to win the game. West Indies will heavily depend on Chris Gayle for their top-order batting, a batsman who has had two games in the
competition - including the warm-up matches - and has smashed two rasping near-centuries
in it. However, the good news for the men for Caribbean is that Andre Fletcher
who opened the inning for the Windies in the game against Australia showed enough
signs that he could be an ideal foil to Gayle in this format of the game.
Having said that, the West Indian middle-order has a lot of improvement to
be done, with both the senior pros, Ramnaresh Sarwan and Shivnaraine Chanderpaul looking slightly out of touch. Sri Lanka will know that an early
wicket or two will almost most certainly put total brakes on the scoring, and
the only other batsman who, for now, looks like he can be trusted is all-rounder
Dwayne Bravo.
Bravo will also be an important cog in the West Indian bowling line-up, as
is Jerome Taylor, but the speedster who will be most difficult to face
for the Lankans could be one akin to their own breed, Fidel Edwards. Edwards
has a very similar slinging action to Lasith Malinga.
The Sri Lankans had M.Muralitharan and Ajantha Mendis in their Australian
game to support Malinga, but one does get the sense that Kumara Sangakkara may
want to rest Mendis for this game to avoid exposing him to more of the other
teams; especially given that there is a reasonable chance that Sri Lanka could
meet West Indies in the semi-finals too.
Sanath Jayasuriya will hope to fire for the Sri Lankans, something he hasn't
done for some time now; including a bad run of form for the Mumbai Indians.
T.Dilshan looks to be in reasonable touch, but it would have been the batting
of Jehan Mubarak lower down the order that would have impressed the Sri Lankan
management, given that their batting middle order looked a little weak for the
Australian game.
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