India won the toss and have stuck England in under overcast conditions. Might not be a bad idea if the ball is moving around. ZK et al could be quite effective here.

Wonder what Owais Shah did to deserve being dropped? He scored more runs in the series against the Windies than anyone else in the Englanad side. Why isn't he playing in place of Bell?

Why would the batting side want to use the fielding restrictions to their benefit?

Another pretty underwelming knock from Prior allied to a poorly thought out dismissal in what would have been Zaheer's final over. Now to be fair to him asking a guy to pinch hit in traditional English conditions is 99 percent of the time completely pointless and surely he'd be better served offering some big hitting down at 6 or 7 in the less taxing latter overs whilst the proper batsmen lay the platform? This ludicrous obsession with exploiting the power plays simply doesn't work if you don't have the players capable of using them and without Trescothick we simply don't.

Phil Mustard did on Saturday! (I assume conditions are different today?)

As it's down at the Rosebowl I guess so.

I've a lot of time for Mustard (though not as much as I have for Ambrose ) but he's still very much a work in progress and is probably 12-18 months off consideration. Following the Prior, Jones, Foster (and Read back in 99) experiments the last thing we need is another one of those trying to sort out his game at the highest level.

England doing rather well at 128/1 after 28 overs. Cook is something of a revelation at ODI level; I always thought that he was best left as a Test player. With KP and Flintoff still in the hutch, India could be looking at a score around 300 to chase.

100 partnership off only 113 balls. Great effort to date and they have indeed laid an excellent platform but the key is that one of Bell or Cook makes a hundred from this position. This is a golden opportunity for someone other than KP to play a match defining (possibly winning) knock and not another promising 60 or 70 before meakly handing over to one of the big guns KP or Flintoff.

(India really should have played the extra frontline pace bowler Munaf)

England finish at 288/2. I guess that should be enough, but one would have thought that with only 2 wickets down they would have gone well past the 300 mark.

I agree England should have gone past 300, but I wouldnt write this Indian batting line up off yet......

Edit: Monty's just ran Ganguly out!

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Mark.