SriLanka beats India as England goes one against Australia
Tournament favourites SriLanka continued their dominance over the Asia Cup yesterday as they beat India comprehensively in a warm up for the final match to be played on the 24th between the same two teams. With yesterdays victory SriLanka finishes on top of the league table having won all 3 of their matches in the tournament so far.
Is was one again SriLankan’s day as fast bowler Farveez Maharoof stared for SriLankan’s, with India who were put into bat first were bamboozled by the pacer as Maharoof grabbed a hat-trick and over-all in his 10 overs took 5 wickets for 42 runs as the Indian eventually managed only 209 runs and were bowled out before their allotted 50 overs.
As compared to the performance of the SriLankan bowlers, the Indian pacemen seemed quite ordinary with Kumar Sangakkara and Mahela Jayewardene helping their team reach the total in the 38th over with a third wicket partnership of 104 runs.
The win gives SriLanka the psychological edge going into the final as they completely dominated the Indians in a dead rubber. From the point of view of the SriLankan’s, it was just a promo of what they could do to the Indians in the final of the 2010 Asia Cup tournament which will be played on Thursday (tomorrow).
The Indians never got onto a start that they were hoping for as they lost 3 early wickets for only 19 runs. Later on, Farveez Maharoof managed a hat-trick, which led to four wickets falling with no runs being added to the scorecard as the Indian middle order collapsed.
Looking back at the Indian batting, except for the 5th wicket stand between Rohit Sharma and MS Dhoni who added 79 runs, the rest of the team simply collapsed.
Thus SriLanka has set the momentum for the finals and would have definitely given the Indian camp a lot of thinking and decision making to do before the all important final which will be played in exactly the same conditions.
SriLanka are the most favoured team to win, however it would be unjust to completely write off the Indians as after yesterdays performance they would be looking to improve their cricketing in the finals.
Also in the other one-dayer yesterday which took place between England and Australia, Eoin Morgan produced his best one-day international innings to ensure that the English side kick starts the series on a high note.
Morgan made an unbeaten 103 which in the end was the difference between deciding the winners of the match as Morgan drove his team to victory with four overs of play remaining and in doing so, he struck 16 boundaries.
The Australians who went into bat first managed to make 267 runs for the loss of 7 wickets however they were a touch disappointed not to make over 300 runs as the pitch was a batting paradise and the Aussies failed to capitalize on it. Later, the English batsmen displayed a wonderful master class of batting who showed the Aussies how to play. England has gone one up in the series, with the next match to be played in Cardiff on the 24th of June (tomorrow) in a one-day series that comprises of 5 matches.
Australia will next face Pakistan in a series comprising of all three formats of the game. The series will be played in England and would be part of Pakistan’s home series due to security reasons in Pakistan.
The Pakistani team is expected to arrive in England over the next few days, where they will play a couple of warm-up matches in their bid to get familiar with the English pitches before they take on the mighty Australians, who have been the cause of inflicting many problems in the Pakistani camp as they had white washed the men in green in their recent tour to Australia toward the beginning of this year.
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