The Big Bash League continues on Friday when the defending champions are back in action when the Perth Scorchers go up against the Adelaide Strikers for the second time in three days with this clash taking place at the Adelaide Oval.
The Scorchers won in Perth on Wednesday and will be expecting to deliver a quick double over the Strikers. The Adelaide season will be over when they lose another game so the pressure is all on the home side to deliver here.
Adelaide Strikers
The Adelaide Strikers have just one win to their name this season and that came in their first completed match of the campaign. They started out with a washout and then a good run chase against the Sydney Thunder had people believing that they could do good things this year. It appears that was a false dawn though because they have followed it up with four successive defeats and with four games left they need to win out to have a chance of extending their season.
If you have watched the Strikers this season you will know that their problems stem solely with the ball. You have to have a bit of sympathy for them because they would have made all their plans around Rashid Khan only for him to be injured ahead of the competition beginning. Even so, in five completed matches the Strikers have conceded 200 or more on three occasions and it doesn’t need me to tell them that there isn’t much future in that even allowing for their batting having a good go at trying to match what their bowlers have conceded.
Perth Scorchers
We are in familiar territory for the Perth Scorchers in that here we are in the second half of the regular season and they are still to be beaten. I don’t think they have quite looked like the champion side we have become accustomed to seeing them be but I don’t think they are far off now and are getting better all the time, which is what you want to do in a competition of this kind. They go into the match knowing they have just dominated the Strikers and will be out to do the same again.
The Scorchers have had to deal with a number of absences this season be it through injury or international duty but they are slowly getting into a position whereby they are settled as a unit and the better performances have started to come. To be fair they have generally gone well with the bat all season and now they are starting to fire with the ball. We always look at the Scorchers as the benchmark in this tournament and it doesn’t appear that they are letting anyone down.
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Key Players
Matt Short is the leading run scorer in the competition and you would imagine if the Strikers are going to need this they will need another decent innings from their captain. He scored 50 in the reverse fixture and something similar is needed here.
Lance Morris got the three big wickets of Short, Chris Lynn and Adam Hose when these two sides met in Perth earlier in the week and the Australian speedster could have a big role to play here in what you would expect to be a high scoring match.
Betting
I am expecting another high scoring match here. Pretty much every match we have seen the Adelaide Strikers involved in has been high scoring and all four innings here at the Adelaide Oval have seen scores in excess of 200. The Perth Scorchers haven’t been shy in getting after the bowling with the bat either and we just saw the absolute carnage that they can cause to this Strikers attack and not much is going to change in the space of 48 hours.
On a similar ground to this albeit rotated 90 degrees, we have just seen these two play out a match which had 46 boundaries in it in Perth and the last match that took place here on New Year’s Eve contained 61 boundaries so there is plenty of reason to think that the 43.5 boundary line isn’t going to be high enough. Adelaide are in the position where they don’t just need to start winning but they need to address their net run rate when they get the chance so even if Perth bat first and don’t go mental again Adelaide will have to push the button to get to the total. With the batting firepower on show here I’ll play over 43.5 boundaries.
Tips
Back Over 43.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.91 with Bet365
