The Major League Cricket season continues on Thursday night when we return to Dallas for the latest offering in the tournament as the Seattle Orcas go up against the Washington Freedom in an exciting looking contest.
The Seattle Orcas have a win and a loss on their ledger this season whereas Washington Freedom are the only unbeaten team remaining in the competition and it will be interesting to see if they can maintain that record here.
Seattle Orcas
The Seattle Orcas were well beaten in their opening match but to their credit they went away and made the necessary changes ahead of their second game and they were way too good for the Los Angeles Knight Riders in that outing. That has given them a good platform to build from and the beauty of the extra two matches for each team this season is that you can drop the first one but still make sufficient progress to finish in the top four.
The Orcas will undoubtedly be much better in Dallas where their batters have the ball coming onto the bat a lot better which suits their bigger hitters a lot more. They were so dominant in that last game that they didn’t even need to call upon their bigger hitters but it is good to know that they have them up their sleeve if they are needed. If they can continue to improve with the ball then Seattle could well be competitive this term.
Washington Freedom
The Washington Freedom have hit the ground running this season. They were solid winners of their opening match against the Los Angeles Knight Riders, which was shortened by the rain but they looked to be in control when the rain arrived. Rain was also a factor in their second match too where they were 62/0 after just four overs chasing 204 and they looked like they were on their way to winning that game. We’ll never know if they would or not but the signs were positive.
Both of those matches were in Morrisville and you would imagine the aggressive intent with which their batters came out with on both occasions they will enjoy the conditions in Dallas even more. Their bowlers might well enjoy them too because there is good pace and carry here so there is every reason to think that the Freedom are going to feel good about their chances, as long as it doesn’t take them too long to react to the different conditions.
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Key Players
Ryan Rickelton showed that he is more than a red ball batter in the SA20 earlier in the year and he doubled down on that with a century in his first game of the campaign for the Seattle Orcas last time out. He’ll hope to go big here too.
Steve Smith has come into this tournament seemingly looking to prove a point having been left out of the Australia squad for the T20 World Cup. He has hit six of the 41 balls he has faced in the competition for six and is striking at 175.60 so far.
Betting
We have so much batting power on show here that I fully expect another high scoring match in this contest. Not only is the batting power on show, there is aggressive intent at the top of the innings for both teams which means that they can jump all over the powerplay which will lead to plenty of runs but also plenty of boundaries and it is the latter which I am going to focus on here just in case someone like Steve Smith reverts to hitting everything along the ground.
The boundaries here in Dallas are perfectly accessible and Seattle have just played a match here where they scored 169/1 and scored 20 boundaries and there were probably more to be had if they wanted them. Washington are yet to complete a 20 over innings so we don’t completely know about their credentials for the whole innings but they have enough batters to score big. Both bowling attacks look gettable so I like over 39.5 boundaries in this one.
Tips
Back Over 39.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.80 with Bet365
