Pakistan start favourites

Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid ponder what this one-day series means for India © AFP

It is not often in a series that one team starts favourites for the Tests and the other for the one-day internationals. But this will be the case tomorrow when India, who were heavily fancied in the Tests but could not prevent Pakistan from sharing the spoils, now find the onus of playing out of their skins on themselves when they take on a pumped-up Pakistan side heavy on allround talent and with the weight of recent history behind them.

Having taken a severe barracking from all quarters after his miserable show with the bat in the Tests, Sourav Ganguly once again finds the familiar sense of being under siege upon him as he tries to rouse a team that has underperformed severely in one-day cricket in the last year.

Ganguly put up a brave face at the pre-match press conference, uttering some of the usual platitudes about one-day cricket being a different ball game from the Tests, and about wanting to do his best with the bat since he had a special responsibility as captain.

He would not reveal anything about team composition, but it is so hot in Kochi - the players will sweat it out tomorrow in 40-degree heat - that it is difficult to see India going in with more than two out of Irfan Pathan, Lakshmipathy Balaji, and Zaheer Khan. That would leave room to play both spinners, Harbhajan Singh and Murali Kartik.

That said, it is difficult to see any bowling keeping the batsmen quiet at Kochi's Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. A combination of a good pitch, short boundaries, oppressive bowling and fielding conditions, and two lineups heavy on high-quality batting should make tomorrow a game in which no first-innings score is safe. Indeed, two of the three international games to have been played at this ground have produced scores in excess of 300.

Pakistan, who have won their last four games against India and boast of a 11-4 win-loss record against India in India, have a lot of heavy-duty ammunition to throw at their opponents. In fact, the likely absence of Younis Khan, suffering from fever, solves some of their selection problems, because there are probably four or five good ways in which they could make up an eleven. Salman Butt, who made a dazzling century the last time the two sides met in an ODI, in the BCCI Platinum Jubilee game at Kolkata, should open, and Inzamam-ul-Haq hinted that the idea of using Kamran Akmal as an opener would be discontinued, allowing Shahid Afridi to return to the position from which he caused so much damage in the Tests.

Shoaib Malik, Inzamam and Yousuf Youhana should follow, and be backed up by Abdul Razzaq and Akmal. That leaves place for two fast bowlers - almost certainly Mohammad Sami and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan - and two spinners from Arshad Khan, Danish Kaneria, and the allrounder Mohammad Hafeez. Were Malik allowed to bowl - he cannot currently because his action is under the ICC's scrutiny - it would make for an even more powerful line-up.

Inzamam asserted that the team's morale was high after the win in the Bangalore Test, and agreed that conditions were inimical to pace bowling. He answered all the questions directed at him with a calm, pleasant air until some mischievous soul piped up to ask him if he was missing the services of Shoaib Akhtar. Not content with Inzamam's deadpan "No," the scribe then asked what the problem was between the Pakistani captain and Akhtar. "Nothing," snapped Inzamam. The Shoaib issue is about the only thing that rankles with him at the moment.

India have two form worries - that of Ganguly and of Irfan Pathan, who looked under the weather for most of the Test series after returning from injury, and appears to have temporarily lost his banana inswinger, rendering him vulnerable to the attention of hitters like Afridi. Ganguly defended Pathan, saying that he had bowled brilliantly for an extended stretch of time and could not be expected to be at his best in every game, but there is no denying that Pathan's form is a serious concern. As for Ganguly himself, he may take some comfort in the fact that, with VVS Laxman having been dropped, he can now bat at No.3. But he will have to produce something mighty spectacular, against bowlers who know all his weaknesses, to ward off his detractors.

But India also, while knowing more or les all there is to know about each member of their opposition, have an unknown quantity of sorts to throw at them - wicketkeeper-batsman MS Dhoni, who in a tournament in Nairobi last year took two centuries off a Pakistan A attack that included, of the current squad, Iftikhar Rao Anjum. A scintillating striker of the ball, Dhoni failed to do anything of note with the bat in his debut series in Bangladesh last December, but he will be itching to go here, and a surprise promotion up the order for him is not out of the question.

Teams (probable)
India 1 Sachin Tendulkar, 2 Virender Sehwag, 3 Sourav Ganguly (capt), 4 Rahul Dravid, 5 Yuvraj Singh, 6 Mohammad Kaif, 7 Mahendra Dhoni (wk), 8 Irfan Pathan, 9 Harbhajan Singh, 10 Lakshmipathy Balaji, 11 Murali Kartik.

Pakistan 1 Shahid Afridi, 2 Salman Butt, 3 Shoaib Malik, 4 Inzamam-ul-Haq (capt), 5 Yousuf Youhana, 6 Abdul Razzaq, 7 Kamran Akmal (wk), 8 Arshad Khan, 9 Mohammad Sami, 10 Rana Naved-ul-Hasan, 11 Danish Kaneria.

Chandrahas Choudhury is staff writer of Wisden Asia Cricket magazine.