7th ODI. Is it Dead Rubber or Fight for honour?

India don't really have a choice, India have to go all out for the win! Australia on the other hand will probably make changes to the side (Again! anyone know that last time Australia played an unchanged 11 in an ODI? lol), Holland, McDonald and Cockley to get games, probably replacing Johnson, Watson and either Hauritz or McKay (depending on if they wanna play 2 spinners or not)

Its a dead rubber because its result wont change the outcome of the series. Australia will probably try a few new players. India should also try a few new players like Tyagi and others.

But when you are playing for your country every match has some meaning. Of course some matches are more important some are less important but there is no such thing as a meaningless game, trying new players itself is very important for any team.

India playing against Week Australians??

Till now 4 Australian players have been sent star player Bret Lee. Johnson not in form, his bowling seems to be cake walk for the Indians.

Now India playing with their full strength. Even then series is at level.

Tomorrow is going to be a game that will a test for the Australians. Ponting needs to ponder. Henriques would be out from 5th ODI.

Will the Australians prove that they are still on top? Or they going to give way for the Indians to be at the TOP.

Will see..

Ponting retires from T20 Internationals

Australia captain Ricky Ponting quit Twenty20 Internationals on Monday, hoping the decision would prolong his career in other formats of the game.

Ponting said he would no more feature in Twenty20 Internationals but would complete his contracts with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League.

"After much thought and careful consideration I have advised Cricket Australia of my decision to retire from international Twenty20 cricket," Ponting said.

"I have also spoken to (chief selector) Andrew Hilditch, (coach) Tim Nielsen and (vice captain) Michael Clarke and I feel this decision provides me the opportunity to prolong my Australian Test and one-day career, an opportunity I am extremely determined about," he said.

"As I said after the fifth Test in London, I am hoping to continue playing Test cricket for as long as possible and retiring from the Twenty20 format gives me the best chance of doing this.

"I will now have set periods of rest throughout the Australian summer and while touring which I feel will be very beneficial," said Ponting, who returned home after losing the Ashes to England.

Earlier this year, Pakistan captain Younus Khan had also quit Twenty20 Internationals after guiding his team to the World Cup glory.

"While I will no longer be available for Australian Twenty20 cricket, I look forward to playing with Tasmania's KFC Big Bash team where possible and to fulfilling my contract with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League," Ponting said.

Ponting has played 17 Twenty20 Internationals, scoring 401 runs at an average of 28.64 and with a healthy strike rate of 132.78.

The 34-year-old Australian, regarded one of the best batsmen of his era, has amassed more than 11,000 runs both in Test and ODIs.

Cricket Australia Chief Executive Officer James Sutherland said Ponting's absence would leave a void in the Twenty20 squad but the board supported the player.

"We are very supportive of the decision Ricky has made and understanding of the reasons behind it. Needless to say he will be a huge loss to the Twenty20 side but it does present opportunities for the other players and leaders within Australian cricket to gain further experience," Sutherland

said.

"While we have not seen much of Ricky in Australia's Twenty20 matches in recent times, his innings in the first ever Twenty20 International against New Zealand at Auckland was probably the best innings I have ever seen in the Twenty20 form of the game," the CA official said.

A formal decision regarding Ponting's replacement as captain of the Twenty20 side will be made later in the year, the board said.

AUSTRALIA - End of the Road

It started with a third-ball duck and ended in a leg-side wide. Those were the events that book ended Australia's lamentable three-day ICC World Twenty20 campaign, and symbolized the struggles encountered by Ricky Ponting's men in comprehensive defeats to West Indies and Sri Lanka.

Australia on Monday suffered the ignominy of becoming the third team after Scotland and Bangladesh to be dumped from the pool stages of the tournament, while the likes of the Netherlands and Ireland remain. Theirs was a campaign rocked by the expulsion of Andrew Symonds, blighted by undisciplined bowling (24 extras in 34.3 overs) and ultimately thwarted by the orthodoxy of batsmen in a format that rewards power and creativity.

In many ways, the result was not surprising. Ponting's side had lost three consecutive Twenty20 matches entering the tournament, and were cast into by far the most difficult group around. But this is Australia - a team bearing the same colors, if not cast, to that which vanquished all before it in the preceding decade - and the expectation shouldered by their world-beating forebears is now a burden for a new generation to carry.

Few outside its own borders will mourn Australia's early exit. Indeed, the image of jubilant Sri Lankans dancing and singing down Bridgford Road, which runs adjacent to Trent Bridge, was no doubt replicated in bars and living rooms the world over by fans suppressed by Australia's era of dominance. But even the hardest of hearts felt a twinge of sympathy for Ponting at the post-match press conference, where his utter despondency and frustration was eerily similar to the demeanor he sported the last time he fronted the cameras in Nottingham - following a series-deciding Ashes defeat four years ago.

"I'd like to be able to tell you I knew what was going on," he said. "That's five international Twenty20 games we've lost in a row. That's a bit of a worrying trend for our team and our group. I couldn't have been happier with what we've done leading into the tournament, everything was spot on. But when the big moments have come along we've just stumbled.

"The group we're in, with the West Indies and Sri Lanka, we knew that they were two very dangerous sides and if we made mistakes they'd make us pay. That's certainly the way it's turned out. I can't tell you how disappointed I am that we're not through to the next stage, for the reason that I can't really understand why. Everything was going along so nicely for us and now we find ourselves out of the tournament altogether. That's it."

In the aftermath of Australia's seven-wicket walloping at the hands of the West Indies on Saturday, Ponting stressed the importance of positive first overs. So when David Warner steered Angelo Mathews' third offering of the afternoon into the sure hands of Tillakaratne Dilshan at point - the low light of an over in which the Australians managed a solitary run - the captain's exasperation must have been palpable.

Ponting channeled some of that frustration towards Lasith Malinga, whom he glanced and pummeled for three consecutive boundaries in the fourth over. But the red mist would eventually prove his undoing. Charging a faster, flatter delivery from Ajantha Mendis, Ponting's anger turned to despair as the ball cannoned into his leg stump, taking with it much of the momentum he had built during his short, sharp innings of 25 from 15 deliveries.

Thereafter, the innings largely belonged to Mendis. Playing his first match against Australia in any form of the game, Sri Lanka's modern-day Johnny Gleeson completely befuddled Michael Clarke and the brothers Hussey en route to the sparkling figures of 3 for 20 from four overs.

Mendis' strength lay in his aerial mastery, more so than his lateral movement off the pitch, as evidenced by his bowling of Ponting and trapping of Shane Watson (22 off 21) and Michael Hussey (one off five) leg-before. The orthodoxy of Hussey and Clarke (11 off 15) proved no match for the unique trajectories and bustling pace of Mendis, and created a hole from which the Australians would always struggle to emerge.

Mendis' union with Muralitharan was largely responsible for Australia's torpid tally of 40 for 4 between the fifth and 14th overs, and created a pressurized atmosphere which Malinga and Isuru Udana would later capitalize on. Both quicks used deft changes of pace to deny the Australian batsmen any sense of rhythm, and if not for Mitchell Johnson's rearguard 28 not out off 13 balls - in which he took 19 of the 21 runs to come from Muralitharan's final over - Ponting's men may have been in for another Windies-style humiliation.

As it was, the Australians were restricted to a total of 159 for 9 - ten runs shy of the total the West Indians devoured on Saturday - and victory never seemed likely; particularly after Dilshan and Kumar Sangakkara pounded 11 boundaries in Sri Lanka's first 50 runs of the innings.

The ten players chosen in Australia's Twenty20 and Ashes squads will now be subjected to the galling experience of remaining in England while the World Twenty20 plays out around them. Their immediate plans involve an extended stay in Leicester, and an attempt to ensure the bitter disappointment of their three-day World Twenty20 campaign doesn't metastasise into a problem that corrupts their Ashes campaign.

"Next week I don't think there'll be too much freshening up," Ponting said. "I reckon we might get flogged a bit by the coach next week. We need to talk about it and we need to address some of the issues and some of the areas where we've been so deficient in the last couple of games. We need to talk about that tonight and get that done because some of the guys will be out of here soon.

"When the specialist Twenty20 players do leave then we do have a real focus on just cricket. There will be nothing else to think about, nothing else to talk about. That will be my job, to make sure we get over this loss pretty quickly and start focusing on the red balls and the white clothing for the next few months."

Lord's welcomes new world order

Twenty20, once the cheeky, brash upstart of world cricket, firmly joins the establishment from Friday when Lord's stages the opening match of the 2009 World Championship.

The shortest form of the game has endured a brief, dramatic and sometimes controversial life ever since it was launched as a radical plan to resuscitate English county cricket in 2003.

"The game in England had been associated with the middle-class and the middle-aged. White males," said Stuart Robertson, who was the England and Wales Cricket Board's marketing manager at the time and credited with being the brains behind the new format.

"But we discovered that there was a vast potential audience of women and children. And younger men too, aged between 16-34."

Twenty20 has been accused of ignoring tradition and destroying technique, but unlike many aspects of the modern game, it plays to full houses with the kind of dizzying razzmatazz and lucrative TV deals which would have seemed impossible when the first international was staged in February 2005.

That was in Auckland where Australia and New Zealand opted to dress in 1980s gear and sported fake moustaches and beards.

Australia won the game, but few took it seriously.

Two years later, people stopped laughing as South Africa hosted the first World Twenty20 which India, the financial powerhouse of the sport, clinched after beating bitter rivals Pakistan in the final.

The format has made millionaires of some players, mostly through the Indian Premier League (IPL) which only two weeks ago completed its second tournament.

IPL commissioner Lalit Modi has dismissed talk that the growth of such tournaments was leading to an overkill of Twenty20 cricket.

"We've just finished a study in South Africa that showed 70 percent of the people who watched the IPL this year had never watched any form of cricket before," said Modi.

Despite the giant shadow cast by the IPL, the event does have its detractors.

Australia captain Ricky Ponting, who sat out the 2009 IPL but will lead his team at the World Twenty20, expressed his concerns over the money on offer in the IPL as well as the rebel Indian Cricket League.

"Unless a balance is achieved, I could see some countries' teams declining in the way Zimbabwe's sides have struggled over the past few years," said Ponting recently.

The World Twenty20 is being played at three of England's most famous grounds - Lord's, The Oval and Trent Bridge with the final to be staged at Lord's on June 21.

India, whose administrators were originally hostile to Twenty20 because they feared its commercial impact upon the 50-over game, welcome back nine members of their 2007 title-winning squad.

Left-armer Rudra Pratap Singh, who took 12 wickets in South Africa, will be supported this time around by Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma.

Pakistan, starved of international cricket at home after a terror attack on the Sri Lanka team bus in Lahore in March made the country a 'no-go zone', will fancy their chances of going one better this time around.

However, their confidence took a battering on Wednesday when they slumped to a demoralising nine-wicket defeat to India in a warm-up game at The Oval.

Australia have dominated all forms of cricket during the last decade except Twenty20 and Ponting is determined to improve both his and the team's record.

"The past couple of games I've played have been very poor," he said. "In the two games in South Africa I made one in each. It's not great form going into a World Cup."

Sri Lanka and New Zealand have repeatedly punched above their weight in international tournaments and could do so again. In fact, Sri Lanka boast the world record score in the format, 260-6 against Kenya in 2007.

South Africa, who won both of their two previous Twenty20s against Australia, are desperate to add a one-day title to set alongside their achievements in winning Test series in both England and Australia during the past 12 months.

Bangladesh and Ireland, who have both enjoyed shock wins on the global stage in the past, will dream of further upsets.