There are three days left in the group stage of the Vitality Blast and the first of those is on Wednesday when there is one match taking place in the North Group as Lancashire play host to Nottinghamshire at Old Trafford.
Lancashire can not just secure a quarter final spot but ensure a home match in the last eight should they win this. Nottinghamshire are playing purely for pride and a bit of momentum to take into the One Day Cup with them. There is no TV coverage of this one so it is the Lancashire live stream you need if you want to watch.
Lancashire
Lancashire are usually one of the strongest teams in the North Group but there was a concern that England had taken too many of their players to the T20 World Cup and whether that would hamper them too much in the early part of this campaign. Those concerns were unfounded as Lancashire have been in the upper part of the section all tournament and go into their penultimate match of the group phase with six wins from their nine completed matches.
Lancashire have most of those players back now so you would imagine them to go from strength to strength and with their home record being one of the strongest in the competition over a lengthy period of time, they should be really confident about securing their home match in the last eight before they host Northamptonshire in their last game on Friday evening. Lancashire look strong with the bat and now they have the bowling artillery to go well too.
Nottinghamshire
This has been a rotten campaign for Nottinghamshire. It started terribly and although it has improved a touch in the second part of it, that was largely because the bar was set so low that it was hard not to show some sort of improvement. They have won just two of their 10 completed matches and have been out of contention to qualify for the quarter finals for a while now. They don’t lose as many players to The Hundred as usual though so getting some form ahead of the One Day Cup will be a priority.
Nottinghamshire just haven’t batted at all well this season. Usually we are used to seeing them blow teams away, especially at Trent Bridge, but only twice in the tournament have they scored more than 160 and in modern day T20 cricket scores below 160 are putting huge pressure on the bowling attack and more often than not is not going to be a winning score. That has reduced them to the role of being a spoiler of the Lancashire party.
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Key Players
Liam Livingstone returns to the Lancashire squad for the first time since the T20 World Cup and all eyes will be on him mostly to see what he delivers with the bat but his spin bowling could be useful on this Old Trafford deck.
Joe Clarke is the only Nottinghamshire player to have more than 180 runs in the competition this season which is a pretty damaging statistic. He is also one of only two players in the current squad to have passed 50 this season. Nottinghamshire need him to go big here.
Betting
I expect Lancashire to win this match but they are plenty short enough to do it and there isn’t enough juice in the wickets side of the handicap for me to get involved in that market so I am having to find another way to get against Nottinghamshire here and when you look at their batting efforts this season it has to be by backing them to score fewer than 18.5 boundaries. The first thing we should say is this isn’t the smallest ground on the county circuit so the boundaries take some finding.
Nottinghamshire have only hit 164 boundaries in their 11 innings in this tournament so they are averaging around 15 per innings which is comfortably lower than the line here. The other thing to take into account is that this Lancashire bowling attack is very good and this could be a trial by spin with Tom Hartley, Liam Livingstone, George Dockrell, Luke Wells and Chris Green while there are two international seamers in Saqib Mahmood and Luke Wood. It is only really Joe Clarke in decent touch for Nottinghamshire with the bat so if Lancashire get him early 19 boundaries looks to be beyond them.
Tips
Back Nottinghamshire – Under 18.5 boundaries for a 3/10 stake at 1.73 with Bet365
