The Caribbean Premier League is back at the Kensington Oval on Thursday night when the CPL 2025 campaign will officially end for one of the Barbados Royals and the St Kitts and Nevis Patriots when they clash in a crucial game for both.
It is pretty simple here. A win for either will keep their faint hopes to making the top four alive but the team that loses here will be guaranteed to be watching on when the finals get underway next week so there is plenty at stake in this one.
Barbados Royals
This has been a season to forget for the Barbados Royals so far but even though they have picked up just one win in their seven completed matches, there is still a way into the top four in the table. It requires them to win their last three matches and for Guyana Amazon Warriors to lose their two remaining games but it is possible. They have Guyana in their last game so it isn’t quite as unlikely as it sounds but it will all be irrelevant if they don’t win here.
Barbados finally got the elusive win that they desired last time out. To be fair to them, they probably should have won the two matches prior to that and they will hope that failing to do so will not come back to haunt them. If it isn’t to do that then they need to bowl as well as they did in their previous match. It helped that they had a decent score on the board for their bowlers to defend but once they got on top of the St Lucia batting they held their nerve well to win. They will be looking to take the confidence of that win into this one and keep their season alive.
St Kitts and Nevis Patriots
It seems almost impossible that it is the case but the St Kitts and Nevis Patriots are still alive for the season. They have watched as the last few results have gone the way they needed and now if they can do their own bit then they just don’t know where it could take them. They need to win here, hope Barbados lose to Trinbago and then that Guyana lose their last two matches and they would need to repair the net run rate difference between themselves and the Amazon Warriors too.
That means that while they have to ensure that they win here, if they get the chance we can expect to see the Patriots look to win as big as possible. For that to happen they will probably need their best batting effort of the season so far and a similar bowling effort to the one that they produced against the Amazon Warriors last time out. They should have taken a lot of confidence from that win and having had a few days to recover and form a game plan for this one there can be no excuses for St Kitts and Nevis here.
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Key Players
We saw once again the fireworks that Rovman Powell can provide in the last game for the Barbados Royals but I still can’t help thinking that he comes in too late to make a maximum impact. It will be interesting to see if someone tempts him up the order here.
Mohammad Rizwan was the main driver of the win over the Guyana Amazon Warriors for the Patriots last time out and with him moving up to open to marshal the innings, if a couple of batters can get in with him then St Kitts and Nevis could get out of this match what they need to.
Betting
This one should be a really competitive contest between two sides who know that they have to win the game else their season is done. I think for that reason it will be a high scoring game because they will want to bat the other out of the contest but rather than take the over 338.5 runs, which I wouldn’t say won’t land, I think the better bet for this one is to go with over 16.5 sixes which you would imagine if there are 340 runs, there will near enough automatically be 17 sixes.
The big reason for liking over 16.5 sixes, along with the fact that there were 24 of them in the previous match on this ground, is that were Barbados to bat first and fall short of the 170 range which keeps the over 338.5 runs bet alive, St Kitts and Nevis will be going all guns blazing to get the total as quickly as they can in order to do a bit of a repair job on their net run rate. Barbados might need to fix their run rate too so they could use any opportunity that presents itself to go big too so I like the sixes over the runs and they feel like they’ll be in play in more scenarios.
Tips
Back Over 16.5 sixes for a 3/10 stake at 1.91 with Coral
