The opening match of the SA20 takes place on Tuesday as the MI Cape Town and the Paarl Royals meet at Newlands to get a new era of cricket in South Africa underway in what those involved will hope is a successful contest.
These are the two favourites for the title going into the tournament so this is an immediate chance for the pair of them to lay a bit of a marker down. With only five home games for each team the emphasis is probably on Cape Town here.
MI Cape Town
If we are using the Indian Premier League as a guide to what we might see in this tournament then the MI Cape Town side should be ones to watch. The Mumbai Indians are a successful side in that competition and they will be looking to bring that winning formula to this one as well. They have certainly started well in terms of the draft and their recruitment and on paper they look a very good side. It will be interesting to see how that plays out on grass.
I guess when you have a wealth of riches it can sometimes be hard to immediately work out the best combinations and have them in place from the off, especially in this tournament where so many players are coming in from different competitions and countries. I’d say that Cape Town look stronger with the bat than the ball but that isn’t to take away from their bowling options, they just have some fearsome batters at their disposal.
Paarl Royals
The Paarl Royals are owned by the Rajasthan Royals from the Indian Premier League. That team made the final of that competition last season and the South African version will be hoping to go one better than their Indian counterparts here. There is a consistency to both outfits not least that they will both have Jos Buttler at the top of the order and there aren’t many better openers than him doing the rounds on the franchise scene right now.
There are some fearsome batters in this Royals side such as Jason Roy, David Miller and Eoin Morgan and marquee signings like those have come at the expense of the bowling attack. One man they did have signed up with the ball was Obed McCoy but the Rajasthan man has been ruled out of the competition with injury which is less than ideal. That means Paarl need their home bowlers to really stand up and be counted.
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Key Players
Liam Livingstone had a brutal IPL season but since then he has been injured and hasn’t really made much of an impact in the cricket he has played. He is a big money signing who will be expected to contribute with bat, ball and in the field.
Jos Buttler is a gun white ball player right now and he will be looking to go well for a team who also own him in the Indian Premier League. He hasn’t played since the ODI series nobody cared about after the T20 World Cup so all eyes will be on him to see if he can hit the ground running.
Betting
In the 50 over competition which has recently concluded, the scores here in Cape Town were very much on the low side so I wonder if there will be a bit in the pitch for the bowlers on show here. If there is then it might keep the scoring down a little bit, although with this being the start of a brand new era of South African cricket I would imagine the orders have been for a good pitch to be produced. Newlands is never the easiest place to bat though so this might not be as high scoring as those involved in running the tournament would like.
The boundaries line is 36.5 for this match and that might just be a bit on the high side. Rashid Khan will bowl four tidy overs and then there is the potential of Kagiso Rabada, Tabraiz Shamsi, Jofra Archer, Lungi Ngidi and Sam Curran all bowling in this match and they rarely go around the park either. There are some brutal batters on show but with the exception of Dewald Brevis, none of them have really had much cricket recently so that boundary line might just be out of reach here.
Tips
Back Under 36.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.91 with Bet365
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