The Super Eight stage of the T20 World Cup begins on Wednesday with two matches taking place, the first of which comes from Group 2 where South Africa go up against the co-hosts USA as we head back to Antigua.
The preliminaries of this competition are done and now things start to get serious as we begin the groups which will give us the identity of the semi-finalists. A win here would have the victors in good shape moving forward.
South Africa
I think it is fair to say that we haven’t seen anything like the dominant quality that was expected from South Africa in this tournament but somehow they made it through their group having won all four matches, although they were inches away from losing to Bangladesh and feet away from having to go to a super over with Nepal. It goes without saying that we need to see much more from them if they are going to get out of this group but when you look at their cast list there is a lot more to come.
South Africa won’t be too disappointed with their bowling efforts in this competition, although they would have wanted to run through Nepal much better than they did, but their batting will be a concern. There was a hope that when they got out of USA and into the Caribbean their batting mite would come to the fore but that certainly didn’t happen against Nepal and they need it to come good here with two tough matches to come.
USA
This has been a campaign of dreams for the USA so far. Their run chase against Canada to kick this tournament off was one of the better that we have seen and then their super over win over Pakistan basically ensured their progress. Where they might have got the most confidence though was how they managed to run India relatively close in their third game. To give as good a showing as they did in that game should fill them with belief that they can go further in this competition.
USA have batted really smartly in this tournament and that can’t be said of all the teams. They will now need to adjust from the pitches in their homeland to the more spin friendly ones but if they can do that then there is a school of thought that these wickets will actually suit their bowlers better. It might be that a semi-final spot is beyond the Americans but giving the three teams in this group a major scare shouldn’t be and that will be their initial aim.
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Team News
South Africa have only chosen to rotate their spinners in this competition so far but we are getting to the stage where they might consider playing both of them in which case someone like Marco Jansen could miss out should they wish to go down that route.
The USA captain Monank Patel missed the match with India with a niggle. The consensus seemed to be that he was being saved for the Ireland game which looked more important at the time and with that game having been washed out he should be fit to feature here.
Betting
We have had four matches here in Antigua but it is kind of hard to really judge the state of the pitches because three of the games had Australia and England blowing out associate sides who probably made conditions look trickier than they might have been. Where I do draw some comfort that we’re going to get a higher scoring game than many we have seen is the first match at this ground saw Oman and Scotland combine for 303 runs and in truth the ball didn’t really do much in that 10 over game between England and Namibia at the weekend.
The run line for this match is 270.5 and I think we’ve seen enough from USA to suggest that they’ll make a game of this. They put up 110 on a dog of a wicket in New York against a decent India side and if they bat first we only need them to find another 25 runs here for the over to be in play. It has to be said that South Africa haven’t batted well in this tournament but they’ve really struggled against spin in the Caribbean and we can pretty much ignore their efforts in New York because the wicket was terrible. There isn’t any mystery spin in this America attack and on the flip side of that the USA batters have batted well against pace bowling in the competition. I don’t think the pitch in Antigua is as bad as some of the others so I think we can open up the Super Eight with more than 270.5 runs here.
Tips
Back Over 270.5 runs for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
