Betfair Official Blog

Eng v NZ Second ODI Betting: Schizophrenic Hamilton pitch offers few clues

Click here to view market

Ed Hawkins can find little cheer for England ahead of game two of the One-Day series...

"We will go up to Hamilton, have a look at the wicket and assess it." That was Paul Collingwood's answer to the question of team changes to his England team before they meet New Zealand in Hamilton tonight, hoping to reverse the defeat they suffered against the hosts in Wellington on Saturday.

Look hard, won't you Paul? The skipper's myopia at the Westpac Stadium would have been a good advert for Specsavers. His failure to spot the slow surface was surprising given England's most recent series victory, away to Sri Lanka, came on exactly the same sort of wicket.

More worryingly for the army of England backers, who are looking nervously at the series outright which has flip-flopped - New Zealand [1.95] and England [2.22] - was the tourists' failure to do anything about it.

Collingwood's excuse that the pitch did not suit just did not wash for the simple and basic reason that his batsmen had 50 overs available to do something about it. Even if Alastair Cook and Phil Mustard, the openers, had suffered a failure like Collingwood - this time the power of speech - it would have been quite easy to check on their strike rates to work out how it was playing. Cook's 11 runs took 26 balls and Mustard's 31 came from 60 balls.

This apparent failure to get the their statistical heads on does not bode well for England at Hamilton's Seddon Park venue, which is an odd one to decipher.

The last match at the ground suggests England have little to worry about. New Zealand and Australia played out a hugely entertaining affair little more than a year ago.

The Aussies, thanks to Matt Hayden's unbeaten 181, amassed 346 and, unbelievably New Zealand got them with three balls to spare, despite slumping to 116 for five. That fact, and Craig McMillan's brutal 115 from just 96 balls, suggests it is a belter to bat on.

Unfortunately, the problem for England is that match has been the exception to the rule. Before it Hamilton was traditionally a difficult wicket, so much so that there have was an inquiry into the state of it in 2005.

Indeed, the average first innings score in all of the 13 completed one-day internationals is 218. Take away that monster total from Australia and the figure comes in at 207.

Believe it or not but the centuries struck by Hayden and McMillan in that famous Chappell-Hadlee contest were only the second and third one-day tons seen on the ground in the matches played there.

It is quite possible that following the ire which Seddon Park caused with some poor wickets that there has been a deliberate ploy to make it better to bat on. Certainly New Zealand and Australia would not have been able to enjoy such a run feast - and hit 26 sixes between them by the way - on a slow wicket.

But before you charge in to put your faith in England rediscovering their superiority from the two Twenty20 matches at [1.77] consider that there is nothing stopping New Zealand deciding to soften up the surface a bit. If you were Kiwi skipper Daniel Vettori, the first thing you would have done after the six-wicket win at Wellington was pick up the phone to the Hamilton groundsman and tell him to get the watering can out.

If Vettori has not done that and the pitch is true, calling the top runscorer markets will be tough. On a batting track, the real swashbuckling strokemakers will outscore the more gritty types so instead of players like Jamie How or Peter Fulton for New Zealand, look at Brendon McCullum [5.2] or Jesse Ryder [6.2]. For England discount Alastair Cook and Paul Collingwood, who can be slow to start off with, and consider Kevin Pietersen [4.5], who could find the wicket right up his street. That is of course, if the statistics are not leading us down a blind alley.

• Cricket
• ODI preview