Yaaaaaaaaaaaaawn ! ahead of Lahore test

The sound bites from the players, the ‘expert speak’, the ‘ex-players’ take on the situation, the columnists..hmm all of them are pretty much saying the same thing. It is an evenly matched 2 sides…weather in Punjab… to include or not to include (you know whom !!) blah blah blah. It is kind of okay to read this trash for a couple of days but this seems to be going on, right from the day the last test ended against SL at A’bad and that is where it gets boring.

The real game is still a 2 days away and no clarity has emerged on what the Indian team’s thinking is about the playing XI. There is no clear consensus about how the wicket is going to emerge too since that can assume its own shape in the next 48 hours. Well !! with no special news to report, I am going to confine myself to some observations of mine, after watching the videos of Eng-Pak ODI series.

Here are my 2 cents :

• Pak batsmen were in wonderful form during the series (except no.3 Younis Khan (Well !! you don't have to watch the video to say that - most of you might say but I am giving the above comment based on the dominance and the range of strokes. Form Index - Kamran, Inzy the very best, Butt - provided glorious starts, Afridi & Razzak - typical cameos that can propel a 250 score to 350. Kamran can be a big threat and he seems to score at brisk rate (when I compare the team scores) and he is a busy kind of player. A 4 here and a 4 there and he seems to be off to a galloping pace out scoring Butt
• England looked spent. Except for Flintoff the rest gave up too easily and I did not see anything from the bowlers but for all the dominance, the series was not a runaway Pak victory. It was still 3-2 but perhaps by the final game, Pak took it easy

• I was looking to see whether Shoaib bowled any of the wicket taking slower balls. He did bowl many but from what little I cd see in the highlight (for example, the delivery that got Trescothick in 2nd ODI, they were the old fashioned slower ones - not the new looping type beamer like that fooled Vaughn for example in tests. Shoaib also got a steep bounce and made the batsmen flinch and give dolly catches to close in corden. When Eng bowled in the same pitch, not a single delivery climbed like the way it did for Shoaib
• Rana is no push over. I still remember the thrashing he received last time at the hands of VS (was it a 24 run over but he bowled him too). Rana is a genuine wicket taking bowler now and from the 1 inning he played, he is not exactly a mug with the bat too.
  
• Finally, England could have made a match of it, especially after winning the 1st ODI but they were out batted by Kamran and Inzi and the bowling of Shoiab and to some extent Rana.

India need not fear Shoiab - afterall it is going to be 10 overs max. They must plan more in their bowling and fielding. How to contain the quick scoring openers and Inzi (and perhaps Afridi since he seems to enjoy so much psychological advantage over India)