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India eager to square the series, history favoures hosts
Lahore, Mar 20: Having seen both sides of the coin in the last two games, setting the target at Rawalpindi and chasing it at Peshawar, the Indians are in quandary as how to draw parity in the series when they take on Pakistan in the fourth one-dayer here tomorrow.
Not withstanding skipper Sourav Ganguly and coach John Wright's assertion that the Indians will comeback in the series and all is not over yet, the visitors realise that beating Pakistan in their own backyard needs special strategy and planning.
The question is whether Ganguly and Wright have got their plans right.
Indian bowling has left much to be desired but almost the same is
the case with the Pakistanis. Though Ashish Nehra's replacement
Amit Bhandari has arrived here, it remains to be seen whether
the Indian team managment will be bold enough to go for a fourth
seamer. Otherwise, it will be toss up between Amit and Zaheer Khan,
with Irfan Pathan having sealed his place with superb showing
at Peshawar.
It was in the warm up match at the Gadaffi stadium here that India
first came to terms with the conditions here. The batting was in fine
fettle but the bowlers were carted all over the stadium by two
young openers.
The cricket in the first two ODIS ran to the same pattern of
Indian batting clicking and the bowling being taken apart by batsmen
willing to throw safety out of the window.
The tourists return to Lahore one down in the series and needing desperately to win the first of the remaining two day-night internationals to stay in the series. Playing only four specialist bowlers as India do, the task becomes that much harder even if Sachin Tendulkar's occasional googly does fetch a contentious wicket as it did in Peshawar. Bureau Report