The penultimate day of the Vitality Blast group matches comes along on Saturday when we have one match to get stuck into and it is a pretty big one in the North Group as the second Roses match of the campaign sees Lancashire taking on Yorkshire at Old Trafford.
These two met in the County Championship earlier in the week when the match was abandoned early after the outfield at Headingley was deemed unsafe. There should be no such issues here in a match Lancashire have to win to guarantee qualifying for the quarter finals.
Where to watch
The match will be shown live on the Sky Sports Cricket channel. The build-up to the contest begins at 4.45pm with the match itself getting underway at 5pm.
Lancashire
In the early stages of the competition, Lancashire looked like they would cruise into the knockout stages. Going into this match they still sit in third place so if the competition stopped today they would be through but this is their final group match and were they to lose it and results go against them on Sunday, they could end up missing out on a quarter final place, so this is a huge encounter for them for more reasons than the Roses rivalry.
Lancashire haven’t been as strong in this competition since the international white ball stuff started. That is understandable but they had a good win over a dangerous Durham side on Friday evening and if they can follow that up here they will be able to prepare for a quarter final once The Hundred has been played. In the main, Lancashire have gone along ok with the ball so if they can bat well they would give themselves every chance.
Yorkshire
To be fair to Yorkshire, they were probably expected to go the same way as their arch rivals here when the England call ups started getting involved with them. That hasn’t been the case though. You would be pushing it to suggest they went from strength to strength but they haven’t weakened too much and they have already confirmed their quarter final spot. A win here would see them with a home quarter final as well which is what every club craves.
Yorkshire are in the middle of a win one, lose one sequence of results at the minute and their fans will be interested to know that if that trend continues here then this is a match they are going to win. They are probably a batsman light though so they either need the pinch hitter to stand up and be counted or they need their main batsmen to really deliver the goods. In the main their bowling has been fine all season which has kept them in matches.
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Team News
Lancashire remain without the likes of Jos Buttler, Liam Livingstone, Matt Parkinson and Saqib Mahmood who are all on England duty so barring a late injury they are likely to go in with the same XI which beat Durham on Friday night.
Yorkshire have England Test captain Joe Root available for this match. He comes in for Will Fraine who is injured. Yorkshire are without a number of big players with Tom Kohler-Cadmore and Lockie Ferguson out injured and David Willey, Jonny Bairstow, Adil Rashid and Dawid Malan all with England.
Betting
Given all the injuries and the absentees that are around this game I’m not going to go too big on the match but there is a slant that I’m happy to attack here and that is that I expect to see a high scoring match. We saw one of those when these two sides met at Headingley a couple of weeks back and I see no reason why that is going to change on an Old Trafford pitch which always plays well in white ball cricket and where in humid conditions the ball should fly.
I think it is fair to say that both these bowling attacks have been hit hard by the England call ups. Lancashire have lost their two best bowlers and while Yorkshire don’t see a whole lot of Adil Rashid they do miss David Willey and will miss Lockie Ferguson who closed out the win in the reverse meeting. Both sides are lighter with the bat than they would like in terms of their explosive players but they still have enough depth in their ranks to suggest to me that we are likely to see more than 325.5 runs here.
Tips
Back Over 325.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
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