The SA20 season continues on Friday with our first double header of the tournament with the action beginning at Boland Park where the Paarl Royals will go in search of their first win of the season when they take on the Johannesburg Super Kings.
We’ve seen all six teams in the competition now and can get a better feel for proceedings from here on in. Paarl will be looking for a first win while the Super Kings will be looking to build on their opening victory.
Paarl Royals
This feels like a big match for the Paarl Royals after they were beaten in bonus point fashion by the MI Cape Town team in the opening match in the tournament. To be fair to the Royals they ran right into the face of a blitz from Dewald Brevis and when you do that you’re not going to win many matches such is the power he has at his disposal, but there was some bowling which fed him too much and that will have disappointed the Royals.
To be fair to that bowling unit, it always looked a little vulnerable on paper with so much money having gone into putting a pretty fearsome batting unit of their own together. That wasn’t helped any when Lungi Ngidi couldn’t go so soon after getting back from Australia. The Royals will be hoping that he can come into the side and add some firepower to the bowling unit. A better showing from their batting order overall wouldn’t go amiss either.
Johannesburg Super Kings
You don’t win many cricket matches of any kind from the position of 27-4 after six overs let alone a T20 match so the Johannesburg Super Kings deserve enormous credit for the way they didn’t panic and turned things around in their opening win over the Durban Super Giants. Teams often get more out of a win like that than they do from matches which they dominate from start to finish. They will know they need to play better here but they have that in them.
You would imagine their top order won’t flounder like that again, especially against a weaker looking bowling unit, and the fact that order know they can get themselves out of a hole down the list will only free them up to be more dangerous at the top. There is probably more to come from the Super Kings with the ball when you consider that Romario Shepherd only bowled one over in that first win as did George Garton.
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Key Players
Jos Buttler scored decent runs in the opening game but he didn’t do it with the fluency we have seen from him over the last 12 months or indeed that we expect to see from him. He’ll be hoping to be more convincing in this match.
All eyes will be on Donovan Ferreira to see if he can back up the pyrotechnics of the opening match here. If he can then he is going to be a very rich man over the next 12 months or so when the next bunch of drafts and auctions come around.
Betting
Boland Park is one of those grounds which again wasn’t the highest scoring in the 50 over competition which recently concluded in this part of the world but it was high scoring in two ODIs between South Africa and India around this time last year which suggests that when he needs to the groundsman can prepare a decent deck. We’ve seen excitement, energy and entertainment as the buzz words in the competition to date so I would imagine a good pitch has been the instruction here.
That makes me think the 18.5 boundaries line for the Johannesburg Super Kings can be covered here. Four of their top five were out inside the powerplay in their first game and contributed 17 runs between them yet the Super Kings still blasted 25 boundaries in Durban. I don’t see this top order failing too many times, there is too much class in it and Janneman Malan is actually on his home ground here too. He, du Plessis, Reeza Hendricks and Kyle Verreynne are much better than they showed in that opening game and with the power to follow them I expect the Super Kings batters to feast on a weak looking Paarl attack which got smoked to all parts in its opening game.
Tips
Back Johannesburg Super Kings – Over 18.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.83 with Bet365
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