The Melbourne Stars play their first home match in the latest Big Bash League season on Tuesday when they host the Brisbane Heat. The two sides have already met in this campaign when the Heat won a high scoring contest.
It has gone pear shaped for both teams since then so you get the feeling this is a big game for both. It may be bigger for the Heat as they have played two extra matches but this is one neither will want to lose.
Melbourne Stars
The Stars have had a week off since their last match and having lost both matches in this campaign that break might well have been needed to take stock of where they have been going wrong and work out what they need to do going forward. I don’t think they will panic yet, especially with the two extra matches this season, but they could do with a win to ease the pressure.
If there is a concern from their opening two matches it might be that both units have failed them. The bowlers failed them in Brisbane in their opening game while their batting couldn’t handle the Perth Scorchers attack in their second game. In fairness not many have handled the Scorchers but you get the feeling the Stars need a good all-round performance pretty soon.
Brisbane Heat
The Brisbane Heat have two wins and two defeats from their four matches so far. They have either won convincingly or lost convincingly so they will need to perform to their best if they are going to get the job done here. A win here would get them out of the mini logjam that is forming on four points.
Their last match saw them beaten heavily by the Adelaide Strikers on New Year’s Eve. After an encouraging bowling effort for the second time in the tournament they lost a stack of early wickets and were unable to recover. For that to have happened twice in four matches you would have to say that is a bit of a concern.
Team News
The Melbourne Stars bring Kevin Pietersen back into their squad after he missed the Boxing Day match when he returned home. Liam Bowe also comes in. Peter Handscomb is away with Australia.
Brisbane Heat have made one change of their own. They have brought Sam Heazlett in for Jason Floros in a bid to stop these poor batting efforts from happening. Chris Lynn is expected to play.
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Betting
I’m not really that eager to get involved in the match betting here. Melbourne Stars haven’t played for a while and I never see that as a good thing while the Heat go into this match off the back of a horrible batting performance so it is the side markets for me here.
The one in question is the total runs in the match where the line of 326.5 could be a little on the high side. There were four matches on this ground last season and none of them covered this total. One of those matches was between these two teams when there were only 277 runs match in all. This isn’t a high scoring ground because of the size of it and we saw in the Test match that the pitch can be a bit dead. Neither batting line up has really dazzled yet so I fancy this will keep the trend of low scoring matches on this ground going.
Tips
Back Over 326.5 runs for a 4/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
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