The fourth year of The Hundred gets going on Tuesday and after we have looked at the eight teams in the outright market it is time to have a look at which of the star batters on show could lead the way in terms of run scoring in the tournament.
Jos Buttler was more than 150 runs ahead of anyone else in the competition a year ago courtesy of Manchester making the final, but he won’t be around this season so we are going to have a different leader of the run chart.
Recent Winners
2023 – Jos Buttler
2022 – Dawid Malan
2021 – Liam Livingstone
Market Leaders
Phil Salt is the new favourite to be the leading run scorer in the competition after the withdrawal of Buttler. That means there is going to be a lot more emphasis on him this season as Manchester look to back up their run to the final last term but as a first time captain I’m a little reluctant to get involved. He is also based in Manchester where you are chancing your luck with the weather. He was fourth in the runs last year though so if the captaincy doesn’t affect his batting there is no reason why he can’t go well.
Dawid Malan has changed teams for the fourth season of the competition and you would imagine having four matches at The Oval would be no detriment to his chances, although having four at Trent Bridge wasn’t exactly a bad thing in the past. Malan was the top scorer in this tournament in 2022 when he was in a real rich vein of form. You sense he has regressed a little since England disposed of his services but this is a chance to prove he can deliver the goods for some teams over the winter so I would expect him to go well.
Will Jacks went to the T20 World Cup expected to deliver fireworks for England but he was the fall guy after their indifferent first two performances even though he did nothing wrong in those games. He did have a good IPL campaign though and is around for the whole season for Oval Invincibles and in four innings this season for Surrey in the Blast he has already clobbered an 86 and is striking at 180.59. Jacks has four matches at The Oval and another at Trent Bridge so he should go well.
Alex Hales has a terrible time of it in the T20 Blast for Nottinghamshire before he left to go to the Sri Lanka Premier League where he found a bit of form making 326 runs in his 10 innings. With Dawid Malan having left the Trent Rockets and Joe Root not around for the first week the former champions will need the ex-England opener to come and showcase his best stuff. At his best he could go well but others would be preferred in the market for me.
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Limiting the Field
Whenever we bet on a market like this that has so many runners and riders we need to lessen the field and concentrate on a smaller pool of players in which to pick our bets out from. There are a number of factors we can use to get the field reduced a little and know where to concentrate.
Firstly it is always worth a look at who plays on which grounds. Certain grounds in any country are higher scoring than others and that is very much the case here. Trent Bridge and Headingley will be high scoring grounds in this competition while Edgbaston is staging the Test match and you can never truly count on the weather at Old Trafford or Cardiff so it might be better to focus more on the former rather than the latter.
Another way to whittle down the field is to take players from the sides who you think will make the finals. It might only be an extra innings or two but it could be the difference between winning or not, or even making the top four or not. The other thing to remember is to take someone who will bat high up in their team’s batting order. While we will see some pyrotechnics from those lower down the order players guaranteed to get eight decent innings will outscore the cameos more often than not.
Profile
This has been a bit of a strange summer as usually we have had a lot of international cricket as well as plenty of men’s and women’s domestic cricket but that hasn’t been the case in 2023 so by and large the pitches should all be good, with the exception of perhaps Edgbaston which has staged more than most. In terms of limiting it down it is probably only done on boundary size in which case it might be worth leaving out Southern Brave, Welsh Fire and to a lesser extent Oval Invincibles players as the boundaries on their home ground can be quite big.
Betting
I’ll go with a main bet and an outsider in this market this season. The main bet I think has a brilliant chance in the form of Will Jacks, for me the next big thing in terms of white ball batting out of this country and if Jos Buttler is axed as England captain and goes and plays franchise cricket around the world that could happen sooner rather than later. Jacks was fifth in the run scoring last season and when you consider that the top three are all guaranteed not to play the full campaign this time around and the two below him aren’t in the tournament either there is a good chance for Jacks to go well. He has been potent in the Indian Premier League and the SA20 since he last played The Hundred and is a man with four T20 hundreds to his name. With Oval expected to go well he could easily pick up the extra match or two and I think he’s the batter to beat here.
I don’t think Aneurin Donald is currently the main option to open the batting for the Birmingham Phoenix but you would imagine he will have the shirt until Ben Duckett and Jamie Smith come back from international duty and it might just be that if he catches fire from the beginning of the competition that the Phoenix keep him in as a batter only and he keeps the opening spot that would normally have been filled by Will Smeed. Donald has 315 runs in 10 innings in the Vitality Blast this season and is striking at 199.36 and has three 50s to his name. If those stats transfer to this competition he could easily find himself playing the whole event and from there you never know how many runs he can score.
Tips
Back W.Jacks Top Tournament Run Scorer (e/w) for a 1.5/10 stake at 13.00 with BetVictor (1/4 1-4)
Back A.Donald Top Tournament Run Scorer (e/w) for a 0.5/10 stake at 51.00 with Bet365 (1/4 1-4)
