Friday night means another bunch of matches in the Vitality Blast taking place up and down the country as the domestic T20 competition continues to head towards the halfway point of the league phase of the season.
Although the World Test Championship final is continuing on Friday, we do have a TV match after play has finished at Lord’s while the other games are all able to be watched via a live stream provided by the home county.
North Group
We have a full slate of matches in the North Group on Friday night where the runaway leaders Northamptonshire will look to continue their perfect start to the competition. They welcome a Durham side who need to find some consistency to move up the table. The first match to get underway on the night sees Worcestershire looking to enhance their fourth spot in the table when they take on a Lancashire team who are second going into the night. Nottinghamshire are struggling for consistency but they look to have a golden chance to pick up a win when they host local rivals Derbyshire, who have played five matches and lost the lot. Yorkshire and Bears have two wins from their five matches so their meeting at Headingley is one which they both need to win.
South Group
Just the three matches take place in the South Group but it is where the TV action comes from as the cameras head to Bristol to see the champions Gloucestershire taking on their local rivals Somerset in a repeat of the 2024 final. Somerset have a perfect record of four wins from four while the champions have lost their three matches to date. Hampshire slipped up last time out and they will be looking to get back to winning ways elsewhere when they entertain Middlesex at the Vitality Bowl while the other match takes us to Hove where Sussex will be looking to build on a solid start to the season when they host an Essex side who are without a win in their opening five matches and who are running out of time to make an impression on this campaign.
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TV Match Betting
Two bets catch my fancy in the TV game on Friday evening where hopefully we will dodge the storms that are in the south later in the evening, or they arrive after the game has finished. The first of them is for over 12.5 sixes to come along. We just saw the T20 match between England and West Indies here how accessible these boundaries are and we have a Somerset side who have just been taken for 229 and chased it down. We have only had one Blast match here but both teams scored more than 200 in it and there were 26 sixes in it so there is more than enough to suggest that we will reach more than a dozen of them on the tally here.
The other bet I like in this match is for Oliver Price to be the top scorer for Gloucestershire. In three innings this season he has scores of 51 and 42 along with 12 with the first two being top scoring efforts. That is enough to reel me in but when you then consider that no other Gloucestershire batter has scored more than 38 in a single innings then it looks an even better bet. Price will bat at four which might be no bad thing because he will avoid the awkward bowlers and face the medium pacers and the spinner who isn’t a mystery spinner. Price belted 43* off 15 balls in this fixture last year which was one shy of the top score when the total was reached and he batted seven there. Higher up the order he looks to have a great chance of top scoring again here.
Other Match Betting
I’m going to stay clear of the other two matches in the South Group because the forecast is hit or miss so in terms of the other matches by betting is very much in the North Group where there is just the one that I like the look of. That takes us to Headingley where Yorkshire host the Bears in a big game for both sides after indifferent starts to the campaign for both of them. Rather than bet on the winner of this one it is the sixes which interests me.
The line for this one is 13.5 but these are two teams who are aggressive with the bat and other than the odd mystery spinner don’t really offer too much in terms of top level stuff with the ball. Throw into the mix that Headingley is one of the best batting tracks in the country in white ball cricket these days, coupled with the fact that we are a week out from this venue hosting a Test match against India, which means this game is unlikely to take place in the centre of the square and we have ourselves a good looking punt. So far this season the sixes lines on this ground have been 31 and 15 with the second innings score in the latter being just 107. Everything points to another game where the sixes flow here.
Tips
Back Gloucestershire vs Somerset – Over 12.5 sixes for a 3/10 stake at 2.00 with Bet365
Back O.Price Top Gloucestershire Batter for a 1/10 stake at 6.50 with Bet365
Back Yorkshire vs Bears – Over 13.5 sixes for a 5/10 stake at 1.80 with William Hill
Back it here:
