imageAUCKLAND: Sri Lanka won the toss and put New Zealand into bat in the third one-day international at Eden Park in Auckland on Saturday.

The seven-match series is level at 1-1 as both sides fine-tune ahead of the World Cup in New Zealand and Australia in February and March.

There is one change in the Sri Lanka line-up with Dhammika Prasad in for spinner Rangana Herath.

New Zealand have given their brittle top order batsmen another chance and replaced seamers Adam Milne and Trent Boult with Tim Southee and Mitchell McClenaghan.

Sri Lanka captain Angelo Mathews said he elected to bowl first because he expected the pitch to favour the quick bowlers.

"That's why we're playing three seamers. We're not playing Rangana because he has a slight niggle," Mathews said.

New Zealand were let down by their batting in the second ODI with four runouts, but skipper Brendon McCullum said they could not dwell on that.

"You can't practise running between wickets and certainly you can't do it in a two-day turnaround," he said, adding the short boundaries at Eden Park would help the batsmen.

Teams:

New Zealand: Martin Guptill, Brendon McCullum (capt), Ross Taylor, Tom Latham, Corey Anderson, Luke Ronchi, Dan Vettori, Nathan McCullum, Tim Southee, Mitchell McClenaghan, Matt Henry.

Sri Lanka: Tillakaratne Dilshan, Dimuth Karunaratne, Mahela Jayawardene, Kumar Sangakkara, Angelo Mathews (capt), Lahiru Thirimanne, Jeevan Mendis, Thisara Perara, Sachithra Senanayake, Nuwan Kulasekara, Dhammika Prasad.

Toss: Sri Lanka

Series: 1-1

Umpires: Billy Bowden (NZL), Nigel Llong (ENG)

TV umpire: Ian Gould (ENG)

Match referee: Javagal Srinath (IND)

Copyright AFP (Agence France-Presse), 2015

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