The CouchExpert

 Srikrishnan Chandrasekaran

 14 August 2011

The two one-day series in Zimbabwe and Sri Lanka are both two matches old with Australia and Zimbabwe taking 2-0 leads. Here is a round-up of the first two games of both series.

A young boy, Vitori, being 21 years of age made his debut in the one-off Test for Zimbabwe, started off with two consecutive five wicket hauls. He has got decent pace, and more importantly, he moves the ball away from the left-hander and into right-hander. He might be the youngest cricketer to take 5 wickets haul in his first two matches. Utseya on the other hand continued to show his good skills of spin bowling. Taylor started off well with two tosses in a row and put the opposition in and bowled them to a reasonable total which they chased without much difficulty. The Zimbabwe batsmen Sibanda and Masakadza have shown a lot of character and played good cricket against Bangladeshi spinners to take their team to victory. This is a very good start to the 5 match series for Zimbabwe. The top order of Bangaldesh team collapsed on both the matches and middle order / lower order players made a decent progress to put up a score to fight for. The captain has made good progress in both batting and bowling on the 2 matches. Team Zimbabwe is just a win away from their ODI series win. Bangladesh have put lot of work to give a fight on the upcoming matches.

Dilshan won 2 consecutive tosses, elected to bat but his batsmen haven’t been able to put up a decent score against top class Austraklian bowling on good batting tracks. Australia has dominated the series so far with their strong pace bowling attack and their batsmen showing good skill in handling the pace and spin of Sri Lanka. Senior batsmen in the Sri Lankan line-up are yet to score big runs in the series. Once again in the lower order Kulasekara shows lot of potential as a batsmen. On both occasions Australia won the match with lot of overs and wickets spare. Sri Lanka need to work really hard to win the series from here (0-2). They can probably try promoting Mahela as opener and push Tharanga down to no. 4. They can also give a chance to Charma silva / Samaraweera instead of Chandimal. Australia lost both the T20 matches, but have come back very strongly on the ODIs. The bowlers have done a fantastic job so far which has eased their batsmen to bat without the pressures of chasing big totals.

Let’s hope for a come back from both Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in the upcoming matches. The Asia teams are really struggling in last 2 weeks or so to put a decent score / fight against their opposition. Not too much to cheer about for the Asian teams.