The SA20 2026 season continues on Saturday with a double header of play which gets underway at Centurion as the two Highveld rivals meet when the Pretoria Capitals take on the Johannesburg Super Kings in a tasty looking clash.
Both of these teams will have their eye on winning the title this season and this is a chance for both to get up and running in what will be familiar conditions for each of them, so there can be no excuses for either side really.
Pretoria Capitals
After reaching the final of the inaugural season of this tournament where they topped the table, the Pretoria Capitals have gone a couple of seasons without making the playoffs so their immediate aim as they set out on their journey for year four of their existence is a pretty obvious one, to ensure they do enough to finish in the top four at the end of the league phase. There is no reason why they shouldn’t do that but they need a mentality change after a couple of poor years.
The Capitals have done some big work in the close season to strengthen their side with firepower both with the bat and the ball and this will be the acid test to whether the business they did was the right stuff or whether they have loaded their side with ineffective players. It should be the former when you look at their squad on paper. Their batting looks very powerful, especially for this ground, so if they bowl well they should get the job done here.
Johannesburg Super Kings
The Johannesburg Super Kings have made the finals in all three seasons of the SA20 so far but they are yet to make it through to the title match so they also have some progress that they can make. Generally we see Joburg struggle out of the blocks but then come good but there is no Wanderers Test match this year so they won’t need to see their fixtures played out in blocks which in theory should help the Super Kings.
This is a very experienced side and while there is never a substitute for experience, at the same time at some point those elder bones won’t be able to deliver the goods anymore and if Joburg are going to keep up their run of extending their campaigns then they will need to guard against this team getting old together. If they don’t get old together then you would expect a couple of those players to step up and get the job done for the Super Kings.
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Key Players
Pretoria Capitals spent a lot of money in bringing Dewald Brevis back to his home ground in the auction and the powerful middle order batter will be expected to bring a lot of runs to the party with him. A good start here would do him no harm.
Donovan Ferreira is one of the few players who were retained by the Johannesburg Super Kings at the end of last season and the men in yellow would love for him to show exactly why that was the case in this opening game.
Betting
I don’t think anyone will be surprised that I am expecting to see sixes on this ground. This is one of the best batting wickets in the world and there is altitude so the ball flies further and it is usually a great batting deck with boundaries which are anything but big and so the bigger hitters, and indeed those who don’t really hit it big but hit it clean, can all get stuck in here. We have a line of just 15.5 for this match and that doesn’t feel nearly high enough to me.
We have plenty of clean hitters on show here. The two who will get spoken about the most are Dewald Brevis and Donovan Ferreira but there is also the likes of Faf du Plessis, Rilee Rossouw, Will Smeed, Sherfane Rutherford and others and if just two of those get going then this total will be reached quite quickly. Everything is in the favour of the batters on this ground and I’ll take them to pepper the sixes just like we saw in the opening game on Friday.
Tips
Back Over 15.5 sixes for a 3/10 stake at 1.80 with Bet365
