The Caribbean Premier League rolls into St Lucia for the first time on Friday night as the Darren Sammy Stadium plays host to the tournament at long last. The opening game here sees the St Lucia Zouks taking on the Barbados Tridents.
Both these sides have had mixed starts to the season but with them being the last two teams to play their home legs, each of them have a run of fixtures over the next 10 days or so with which to pick up some momentum and run hot.
St Lucia Zouks
It hasn’t been the best start to the season for the St Lucia Zouks but as I mentioned above there is still plenty of time for that to turnaround but if it is going to do so then their batting needs a stark improvement. To be fair they’ve looked light with the bat throughout the competition so they will be hoping that the arrival of Colin Ingram will spark them into life. On a good batting wicket on this ground they will need to bat well.
By and large, the Zouks haven’t bowled too badly in the competition and that is something that they are going to need to keep up. In theory they should be well suited to this ground with the variety they have in their bowling attack but they will still need to go well to contain some powerful sides in this competition. I always feel the first home game for anyone is big in this event. You can build momentum with a win but a defeat opens up all sorts of doubts.
Barbados Tridents
In terms of results it hasn’t been a much better start to the season for the Barbados Tridents either but this tournament has been going for more than two weeks and they have only played three matches, so I’m going to cut them some slack because it will have been hard to get a rhythm. They can’t have any excuses in that regard from here on in though so now is the time for them to put their best foot forward and find their best form.
I look at this Barbados Tridents side and I see a team who are competitive in all disciplines but not stellar in any of them and that would be a concern. Often teams who are like that need to chase scores so the Tridents might need some luck with the toss, especially here when they are missing a key batsman because of the Vitality Blast finals day.
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Team News
Colin Ingram has joined up with the St Lucia Zouks now to replace Thisara Perera who has been made to attend a Sri Lanka training camp. He will provide strength to the batting and could offer up some leg spin too.
Barbados Tridents will be without Alex Hales for this match as he is back in Birmingham for the Vitality Blast finals day. Dan Christian is joining up with the Tridents but he too is involved for Nottinghamshire so he won’t be around here either.
Betting
There are question marks over both these sides but I think the St Lucia Zouks are the more settled of the two and actually they are probably the better of the two in terms of the bowling options available to them so I’m going to go with the home side in this one. They recruited well in terms of their bowlers ahead of the season and it is now time for them to show why that was the case.
If the Barbados Tridents were in form with the bat then I might have thought twice here but in two of their three matches they have been kept to 140 or less. St Lucia haven’t made a great start to the tournament but they’ve had enough time to assess where they’ve been going wrong and put it right. At 10/11 there is enough in the home price to merit supporting them with a bet here.
Tips
Back St Lucia Zouks to beat Barbados Tridents for a 4/10 stake at 1.91 with Coral
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