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Big picture: Pakistan confident, Australia shorthanded

Australian soil has mostly been the site of nightmares for Pakistan over decades. But ignited by fiery bowling from quick Haris Rauf, Pakistan are on the verge of a rare series victory in Australia and go into Sunday’s decider at the Optus Stadium highly confident after a nine-wicket hammering of the world champions in Adelaide.It can, of course, be fraught with danger to feel any type of certainty over such a volatile team but Pakistan deserve to enter the third and final ODI in Perth as favourites. They probably should have already wrapped up the series if not for Pat Cummins’ late heroics with the bat at the MCG.Pakistan bounced back superbly with a masterclass in the second ODI, blowing away Australia’s batters with skilful pace bowling before impressive young opener Saim Ayub treated Australia’s frontline attack with disdain.It’s hard to recall a more clinical performance by a visiting team in Australia. Pakistan, whose white-ball coach Gary Kirsten quit amid upheaval just a week before the tour, can almost sniff an unlikely series victory and they will face a weakened Australia.Cummins, Steven Smith, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Marnus Labuschagne won’t play as they start preparing for the first Test against India.Josh Inglis will become Australia’s 30th ODI captain and has the tough task of galvanising a new-look team in conditions that will once again test their batting-order preaching all-out attack. There will be considerable pressure on misfiring openers Matt Short and Jake Fraser-McGurk, who have both copped criticism for their shot selections across the two games.While the series is viewed as an entrée to the blockbuster Test summer, as underlined by modest crowds in Melbourne and Adelaide, there is added significance for both teams ahead of the upcoming Champions Trophy in Pakistan.

Form guide

Australia LWWLL (last five ODIs, most recent first)
Pakistan WLLWWJosh Inglis will lead Australia for the first time•AFP/Getty Images

In the spotlight: Josh Inglis and Haris Rauf

Josh Inglis, 29, will make his captaincy debut for Australia and also will lead his team in the subsequent T20I series against Pakistan. Given his heavy workload with the gloves, Inglis has never taken the reins of Western Australia or Perth Scorchers in the BBL, but his leadership credentials and tactical nous are widely regarded. He did captain a very strong Prime Minister’s XI in a first-class match against West Indies two years ago. The England-born Inglis started the season in sublime form and was even bandied around as a possible left-field option to solve Australia’s Test opening dilemma. Inglis continued to look in good touch in the opening two games but failed to convert starts. On a ground he has long dominated in the BBL, Inglis looms as Australia’s key batter as he bids to start his captaincy on a winning note.Haris Rauf has been undoubtedly the standout performer so far this series with eight wickets to rattle Australia. He’s been unplayable at times on helpful surfaces and he has created doubt over whether Australia’s batters can handle rapid pace. Rauf should relish the extra bounce at the Optus Stadium, but he will need to not get carried away. He should strive to replicate the discipline he showed in Adelaide marked by a superb line and length delivery – reminiscent of Test cricket – to nick off Labuschagne. If he can finish off the series in style, then his performances across the three games will go down in Pakistan’s fast-bowling lore.

Team news: Mass changes for Australia

Quick Sean Abbott, who played in the series opener, is likely to return for Australia along with experienced allrounder and Perth local Marcus Stoinis. Hometown heroes Lance Morris and Cooper Connolly will be in consideration, while quicks Spencer Johnson and Xavier Bartlett are also in the squad.Australia (probable): 1 Matt Short, 2 Jake Fraser-McGurk, 3 Josh Inglis (capt, wk), 4 Glenn Maxwell, 5 Marcus Stoinis, 6 Aaron Hardie, 7 Cooper Connolly, 8 Sean Abbott, 9 Spencer Johnson/Xavier Bartlett, 10 Adam Zampa, 11 Lance MorrisAfter such a comprehensive victory in Adelaide, Pakistan are set to remain unchanged.Pakistan (probable): 1 Saim Ayub, 2 Abdullah Shafique, 3 Babar Azam, 4 Mohammad Rizwan (capt, wk), 5 Kamran Ghulam, 6 Salman Agha, 7 Irfan Khan, 8 Shaheen Shah Afridi, 9 Naseem Shah, 10 Haris Rauf, 11 Mohammad HasnainSaim Ayub treated Australia’s attack with disdain in the second ODI•Cricket Australia/Getty Images

Pitch and conditions

A fast and bouncy surface is expected at a ground that aims to mimic the famous conditions at the nearby WACA. But runs usually flow at the ground in white-ball cricket as batters target the relatively short straight boundaries.”The same three principles… pace, carry and bounce but more of a batter’s wicket. Lots of runs,” WA Cricket head curator Isaac McDonald told ESPNcricinfo.It has been a relatively mild spring in Perth and pleasant temperatures in the mid-20s are expected throughout the day fixture.

Stats and trivia

• Salman Agha has the fifth-highest strike rate (94.86) in Pakistan’s history of batters who have faced at least 500 deliveries.
• Glenn Maxwell needs 50 runs to reach 4000 in ODIs.
• The teams have never played an ODI at the Optus Stadium. Pakistan held a 4-3 edge at the WACA.
• Only two ODIs have been played at the Optus Stadium. In front of more than 53,000 fans, England’s 12-run victory over Australia in January 2018 was the first official sports event at the Burswood ground, while South Africa beat Australia by six wickets later that year.

Quotes

“We go to Perth with a clear plan, a clear method. We’re committed to the style we want to play.”

In-form captain has team-mates running out of superlatives and home crowd loving every moment

Andrew Miller14-Aug-20216:00

Root or KP – England’s greatest batsman?

We cannot keep asking more of our star players. That has been the message from the ECB high command in recent months – including on the eve of this Test, when Tom Harrison, the chief executive, insisted the board were committed to a “people first” policy, for the remainder of England’s summer campaign and, most significantly, on into this winter’s Ashes.”It’s no longer acceptable to go ‘once more unto the breach dear friends’,” Harrison said, with Covid restrictions foremost in his thoughts, but with England’s insane itinerary right up there at the top of everyone else’s. For despite such stirring rhetoric, there really is no other way. The reality for England’s cricketers, in the sport’s post-pandemic panic, is that every day is Groundhog Day, every next-biggest occasion ever is just another day on the treadmill.But just as Bill Murray discovered while hanging out in Punxsutawney, some days can still be better than others if you can find it within you to seize the moment. And when you’ve ploughed on for as long as Joe Root has, willing yourself to perform in empty echoing stadiums for months of bubbled-up existence, then to emerge into a sunlight Saturday of a Lord’s Test, in front of a packed and enraptured crowd, with your own family looking on from their box in the Grandstand … well, there couldn’t really be a more perfect stage for a masterpiece.Related

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Root has had plenty reason to wave his bat in triumph in the course of his extraordinary 2021. But few milestone moments have dripped with more glee than his jab into the covers off Jasprit Bumrah, armed with the second new ball on Saturday afternoon. He scampered the single then veered abruptly towards his family in the stands, punching the air with a delirium that only the most devout can know.For Root isn’t just going to the well for England, time and time again. He’s living in the well. He’s so immersed in the day-to-day pressures of carrying the fortunes of his team that he’s become at one with his surroundings, at peace with the pressure of treading water for hours at an end, knowing that if he dares to stop swimming, everyone is liable to sink. Today he soared, and it was glorious.”Joe and I, when we were walking out, we were just smiling at each other,” Jonny Bairstow said at the close, after an innings of 57 that ended up being less than a third of his captain’s tally, but is still, remarkably, the only other half-century to have come from one of his team-mates this series.”How good is it to walk out on a Saturday at Lord’s, with one of your best mates?” Bairstow added. “That’s exactly what it was. Our partnership was about having fun while we were out there, and to have a full crowd back at Lord’s, with the new stand, with family and friends, was really special. That Lord’s buzz, or hum, or however you want to phrase it, was most definitely back.”Mohammed Siraj congratulates Joe Root on his unbeaten 180•Getty ImagesMuch like James Anderson’s first-innings five-for, hindsight confers an inevitability on Root’s magnificence that circumstance really shouldn’t allow. It was a point put to him in the lead-up to this match – as he opted once again to do his captain’s media duties two days out from the Test, in a bid to cocoon his game-brain and filter out the noise for an extra 24 hours.”How are you Joe?” was the gist of the final question, almost as an afterthought at the end of a 20-minute interrogation, featuring topics including the return of Moeen Ali and the wider failings of a team that had been outplayed in each of their first three Tests of the summer, the longest they’d been made to wait for a home victory since their struggles against Sri Lanka and India back in 2014.He insisted he was fine – but then so too, you suspect, did Ben Stokes last month, when he fielded that SOS after the white-ball Covid outbreak, and broke off his recuperation to lead out a squad of reserves. Today, however, Root offered up the most ringing affirmative he could muster, an innings so serene it was as though the solitude of his supremacy had bought even his classically tailored game an extra yard of response time.Soft hands, calm choices, unhurried strokeplay – at least until his white-ball savvy surged to the fore as Anderson got peppered in the day’s frantic closing moments. He barely presented a straight bat through the V at any stage of his innings, relying instead on nudges off his legs for the balls that veered too straight, and needle-threading judgement on his favoured off-side, which made a mockery at times of Virat Kohli’s attempts to bung up his options with a trio of short covers and two slips to check his dab to third man.And in keeping with the need to think happy thoughts to haul England through this summer’s predicament, Root’s running between the wickets was able to step up an extra notch once he had linked up with sidekicks in whom he could fully trust – Bairstow in the first instance, but Jos Buttler and Moeen Ali too, a trio whose white-ball world-beating counts for more than perhaps it ought to in the cramped confines of this itinerary. In the end Bairstow was bested by the short ball – a method he cannot really plan for when ruling the roost in one-day cricket – while Buttler and Moeen made just 50 runs between them. But they between scratched out half-century stands, and gave Root the ballast he needed to drag the match towards parity.None of this is sustainable. It’s barely even credible – much as in 2018, when India’s 4-1 losing margin was a travesty, it beggars belief that they are not already 1-0 up from Trent Bridge, and pushing for a second. But like a high-wire act over Niagara Falls, Root’s progress is both utterly compelling, and so inexorable, you start to believe he might just get to the other side without looking down.

“I run out of superlatives, to be honest”Jonny Bairstow marvels at the feats of his captain

For his achievements in 2021 are already sensational. In the course of this innings, Root first skittered past Graham Gooch’s former England record of 8900 Test runs, then pushed on past 9000 too, and at a younger age than anyone bar the one Englishman ahead of him in the run-charts, Alastair Cook.By the time he’d run out of partners on 180 not out, Root’s tally for the year was close to double that of any other batter in world cricket – 1244 to Rohit Sharma’s mid-match tally of 669 – and while England’s overloaded itinerary is a contributory factor, the comparison with his peers is even more revealing.By the end of England’s innings, Root had scored almost four times as many runs in 2021 as his next most prolific team-mate, Rory Burns (353), and more runs than the rest of England’s top six in this match combined.He’s made five of their six centuries this year, including each of their four 150-plus scores, and is only one shy of England’s all-time record of six in a calendar year. And, as if further proof was needed of the burden he has carried for his side, in this match he even had to see off two hat-trick balls in the same innings. His first ball came in the wake of Haseeb Hameed’s golden duck on Friday; and his 277th came 152 runs later, as Ishant Sharma started a new over, fresh from delivering Sam Curran his own first-baller.”I run out of superlatives, to be honest,” Bairstow said at the close. “He means a heck of a lot [to the team], like he does to English cricket.”To go into second place in the leading run-scorers in the history of the English game is very special, to pass 9000 Test runs in this game is extremely special, to score another 180 not out at Lord’s is great, isn’t it, and to see him in the form that he is, playing the way he is, it’s awesome to be out there with him, putting on partnerships with him, and enjoying every single moment of it.”And as a consequence, he’s on the brink of his masterpiece now. A year to stand comparison with any of the greats that have gone before. Richards in 1976, Ponting in 2005… even the most prolific of them all, Mohammad Yousuf, whose 1788 runs in his annus mirablis in 2006 included nine centuries in 19 innings. That’s as many as Root himself has now played, but he’s still got 12 more scheduled before the New Year. As might have been mentioned once or twice, England’s itinerary really is something else.But more immediately, Root’s got the chance to prove a point about his contemporary credentials. The mutterings in recent seasons were that he had slipped out of the fabled “Fab Four” of modern batting – his century at Trent Bridge last week had been his first on home soil since India’s last tour in 2018, notwithstanding the fact that his role in England’s World Cup triumph had caused a wavering in his Test focus.But now it’s Kohli who’s feeling the heat for his own relative dip in standards. In consecutive series against England in 2016-17 and 2018, he amassed the small matter of 655 runs at 109.16, and 593 at 59.30. Likewise, Steve Smith racked up 687 runs at 137.40 in Australia’s 4-0 rout in their last home Ashes in 2017-18; then followed that up with 774 more at 110.57.Root, right at this moment, has 353 runs at 176.50, with potentially seven more innings to come. The same, in fact, as his next most prolific colleague for the entire year. It may not be fair to expect Root to keep giving more to the cause. But when you’re in a zone quite like this, who would ever wish it to end?

Jos Buttler’s side retain faith in their fundamentals despite fifth ODI defeat in a row

Andrew Miller31-Jan-2023Anyone who has ever worked to a deadline knows how exquisitely zen the onset of panic can be. It doesn’t work every time, or for everyone, but sometimes – particularly for those who know they have the aptitude but find the application harder to come by – there’s nothing quite like a ticking clock to focus the mind and force the issue at hand.So wakey wakey, England’s world-beating 50-over team. We see you there at the back of the class, feet up on the table, yawning your way through your mocks in Australia and South Africa. But, with eight months to go until the defence of the title so thrillingly won at Lord’s back in 2019, and with just four more ODIs to come this side of the summer, perhaps now’s the moment to allow some urgency to drive the agenda?Or perhaps, on second thoughts, now really isn’t the time. Life moves pretty fast, as another famous slacker, Ferris Bueller, once put it. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.Related

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After all, England spent most of 2022 proving – to one extreme or another – that a positive mental attitude can overcome all obstacles, be it a record of one win in 17 prior to Brendon McCullum’s appointment as Test coach, or the seizing of the T20 World Cup in spite of a litany of injuries that would have derailed a less composed squad.And so, even though Jos Buttler’s men have just flunked their way to five consecutive ODI defeats – a run of failure unmatched by England since the summer of 2014 – there is still plenty justification for taking it easy right now, and trusting that the team’s proven knowledge of their subject matter will more than compensate for a lack of exhaustive cramming between now and the big day.After all, what’s the point of scaling endless peaks if you’re not permitted to climb back down to base camp occasionally, to take stock of your latest achievement and gird your loins to go again? Barely two months have elapsed since England won the World Cup! But don’t you dare rest on your laurels… there’s a World Cup to win!It’s little wonder that, in response to a recent Twitter enquiry about the cause of the team’s apparent downturn in white-ball fortunes, Ben Stokes – the main man of 2019 and current Bazballer-in-chief, who announced his ODI retirement last summer due to the insane workload he was facing across formats – responded: “Begins with S ends with E and has chedul in there as well”.ESPNcricinfo LtdWhatever the nuance of their current situation, there’s certainly no sense that England are right back to square one in their preparations for their World Cup defence. There’s been a lack of finesse to their efforts from 2020 to date, with 15 wins and 14 losses since that momentous day at Lord’s, but the team remains – by a whisker – the most attacking batting line-up in the world in that period, rattling along at 6.14 runs per over, compared to India’s next-best figure of 6.13.And as Moeen Ali, who featured in that 2014 downturn, put it in the wake of England’s series-sealing loss in Bloemfontein on Sunday, the current squad is not “in a position like before [the 2015 World Cup], where we were terrible and building a team”.”We’re more experienced, used to different conditions, and going to India where we’ve played a lot of IPL, I feel we’ll be ready to go,” Moeen added. “Results don’t show it yet, but I think we will be better than we were.”And yet, do England even have a chance of being as good as they were not so long ago? Regardless of the stars who may or may not bring their A games for the main event, the bald stats of their ODI performances between the last two World Cups are extraordinary, and point to the extent to which the ECB has given up on the format that, for four years up until 2019, it seemed to care for more than any other.Defeat in Bloemfontein was England’s fifth in a row•Getty ImagesBetween their elimination from the 2015 World Cup and their victory at Lord’s in 2019, England played 98 ODIs, winning a hefty 65 of them – or two in every three. They used 32 players in that period, but the core remained extraordinarily stable. Excluding Jofra Archer, who only qualified on the eve of the tournament (but including Alex Hales, whom England weren’t afraid to banish in the same timeframe in spite of his experience) each of the 12 men who formed the core of that World Cup 15 played at least half of the available games, with Eoin Morgan himself missing just six.Compare that to the current febrile situation. Since the World Cup win, England have played 32 ODIs, with just 11 more scheduled before their defence gets underway. Already, however, they’ve churned through 37 players, of whom just four have featured in more than 20 games. And if those stats are skewed by the Covid outbreak in July 2021 that forced England to field, in effect, their third XI for three matches against Pakistan, then equally the squad has lacked the volume of contests to mitigate for such holes in their preparation.In the three full years between the last two World Cups, England played nothing less than 18 ODIs annually, with a high of 24 in 2018, with which Morgan’s men perfected the front-running attitude that allowed them to embrace the mantra of favourites. In three complete years since 2019, however, they’ve played 9, 9 and 12 – their lowest workload in the format since 1995, offering barely even an opportunity to keep their muscle memory attuned.Stokes, incidentally, was the 22nd player to feature in the format in this post-2019 period. He made his ODI comeback against India in March 2021, 20 months after his heroics against New Zealand, but then binned off the format ten sporadic matches later, protesting with some justification that he could not give “100% to the shirt” while also giving his all to the rebooting of England’s Test fortunes.

Begins with S ends with E and has chedul in there as well https://t.co/U2aF9FOSDw

— Ben Stokes (@benstokes38) January 27, 2023