TEAM INDIA can create history at St George's Park, Port Elizabeth on Friday by winning the fourth one-day international cricket match against host South Africa. Team India, which is leading the ODI series 2-1 has never won any series in South Africa.
After going 1-0 down in the series, Men-in-Blue bounced back in the series and won back-to-back matches on last two occasions. In the third one-dayer in Cape Town, India won the match by two wickets with the help of Yusuf Pathan's match winning inning of superb 50-ball 59 runs, including three big sixes.
From the last couple of matches, Harbhajan Singh has been consistently performing as an all-rounder. He scored important 23 runs and claimed two wickets in the last match. Zaheer Khan and Munaf Patel are doing well in bowling department and creating problems for the batsmen. At Newlands, Zaheer Khan became the 21st bowler and the third left-arm seamer to get 250 ODI wickets.
Young Virat Kohli, Rohit Sharma are scoring useful runs for the team. Experienced Yuvraj Singh, however, needs to show more consistency.
It is likely that in today's match at St George's Park Parthiv Patel will replace Murali Vijay, who has shown poor form in the last three matches. Ashish Nehra, who has secured a world cup berth might also be given rest and skipper Dhoni could include Piyush Chawla in the team for today's match.
In the last five matches, India has won four matches while it lost one, whereas South Africa has lost three and won two matches. The fourth ODI between India and South Africa will be start from 6:00 pm (IST).
India and South Africa probables for the fourth ODI at St George's Park, Port Elizabeth are:
India (probable): 1 Parthiv Patel, 2 Rohit Sharma, 3 Virat Kohli, 4 Yuvraj Singh, 5 Suresh Raina, 6 MS Dhoni (capt & wk), 7 Yusuf Pathan, 8 Harbhajan Singh, 9 Piyush Chawla, 10 Munaf Patel, 11 Zaheer Khan
South Africa (probable): 1 Graeme Smith (capt), 2 Hashim Amla, 3 Colin Ingram, 4 AB de Villiers (wk), 5 JP Duminy, 6 Faf du Plessis, 7 Johan Botha, 8 Dale Steyn, 9 Wayne Parnell, 10 Morne Morkel, 11 Lonwabo Tsotsobe.