Blog

Ahead of the third test Pakistan have had to make two enforced changes and one optional one. Zulqarnain Haider, the star of the second test and sofa favourite, has been ruled out of the rest of the series with a fractured finger. The injury was exacerbated by Stuart Broad hurling the ball at him during his innings of 88 so Kamran once again engineers a return to the side. Umar Gul pulled his hamstring and whilst Pakistan are hoping he can recover for the ODIs and T20 matches in September he will not feature in the two reamining tests. The options to replace him are Tanvir Ahmed and Wahab Riaz. Tanvir is a right arm pace bowler who has not played any international cricket even at the age of 30. He was however the leading wicket taker in Pakistani domestic cricket last year. Riaz is a left-armer who has featured for Pakistan before in five ODIs and a T20 but not since 2008. The final change will be to bring in Mohammed Yousuf for one of Umar Amin or Azhar Ali.

Although the Oval pitch should be easier to bat on than Edgbaston and Trent Bridge were, there will likely still be cloud cover to help the bowlers. I like the under on both sides runs and you can get England under 399.5 at evens at CricketBetLive. The Pakistan line is 290.5 and I like the under here as well. Even with MoYo back in the side they will struggle either against swing bowling at the top of the innings or Swann later on. The England runs line is a bit more debatable as without Gul Pakistan will probably really struggle if they are out in the field for any period of time. Despite that with Cook and Pietersen out of form we should at least get a chance to hedge out the bet around 350 as early wickets fall.

For individual bets I am going under Cook's runs line of 27.5 at CBL. The runs he got for Essex in the T20 semi-final hide an innings in which he still looked badly out of touch and the Hampshire bowlers gave him easy pickings. I am also going over Swann's player points line of 117.5. Pakistan will probably hold up a bit better on the Oval pitch than in previous tests so he should get a good chance to bowl at them. He should also pouch some catches at 3rd slip with the bounce and carry at the Oval.

One bet to be alert for in-running during the game is MoYo's runs line. He has now had some match practice at Worcester where he scored 40 from just 54 balls but this was against a 2nd string bowling attack for an already terrible county. He plundered most of those runs against Chris Russell who has only ever turned out for Worcester 2nd XI. Whilst he's obviously a class bat I suspect the run line will be too high and I would be edging towards the under.

Pick for the test is under on Cook's runs. Good luck.

If signing up with CricketBetLive they have a 20% first deposit bonus and a referral scheme, please email them quoting account 8913 once you have opened your account. Thanks.