The St Kitts leg of the Caribbean Premier League season draws to a close on Tuesday night when the home side St Kitts and Nevis Patriots host the former champions Barbados Tridents at Warner Park.
After their emphatic victory in their last match the Patriots can go top of the table with a win here while the Tridents will be looking to bounce back from a disappointing defeat at the hands of the Trinbago Knight Riders.
St Kitts and Nevis Patriots
It had been a really tough start to the season for the Patriots but that can happen when a new squad comes together. It needs time to settle. It might be that it still hasn’t settled fully and there might be more to come but such an emphatic win as they enjoyed over the St Lucia Zouks was even more encouraging when you think the schedule went against them.
A powerful batting performance was combined with a really good bowling performance where their world class spin duo of Samuel Badree and Tabraiz Shamsi came to the fore but if those two are going to repeat their heroics you would think St Kitts and Nevis will need to bat first with this being a night match.
Barbados Tridents
Barbados were soundly beaten in their opening match of the tournament but they have had a couple of days to reflect on what they right and what went wrong and put different plans into place and things so I’m expecting to see a much better performance from them here.
The Tridents will need their change bowlers to perform better here as we shouldn’t forget that they had restricted Trinbago to 20-4 at one stage but they allowed Hashim Amla and Dwayne Bravo to get away from them. The positive from that defeat was that AB de Villiers and Kieron Pollard produced nothing with the bat so there is plenty more to come.
Betting
It is becoming a bit of a lottery in picking the winners of these matches at night time because of the dew effect and things like that but on this ground that isn’t so much of an issue because the obvious area to target is the sixes anyway. The first night game here saw the chasing side win and I would expect there to be a good chance of that in this one too.
The sixes line is only at 14.5 sixes which looks on the low side to me. I know it was a day match but in the last match here St Kitts and Nevis hit 13 sixes and that was without Thisara Perera and Carlos Brathwaite not hitting any so they have more to come in that regard.
There are plenty of hitters in the Barbados Tridents’ line up. Steven Taylor showed his power in their first game and then there is AB de Villiers, Nicholas Pooran and Kieron Pollard while David Wiese and Shoaib Malik can smoke a ball.
We’ve seen throughout the last few weeks how small this ground is and if the dew does come down it is going to be near enough impossible to defend a score here. As we saw in the game on Monday night in Trinidad bowling with a wet ball in the night games is a recipe for disaster. The sixes so far here have totalled 14, 14 and 21 and I’m expecting plenty more again in this one.
Tips
Back Over 14.5 sixes for a 4/10 stake at 1.80 with Paddy Power
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