The bigger and bigger development of 20/20 franchise tournament cricket around the world, particularly the Big Bash in Australia and the IPL in India offers a truly unique dynamic in sports betting not seen in any other team sport and as such presents opportunity with the bookmakers having to act on incomplete information before a bowl is bowled in the tournament and having to act and react to the relentless day to day action and the shifting movement in team selections, batting orders and bowling combinations each team employ.
The construction of 20/20 sides in these global tournaments generally consist of the recruitment of players from all nations around the cricketing globe, depending on availability, international schedules and finance mixed with local and national talent for a perspective team. The result of which means a large group of players who have not played together before and making it very difficult before the first games to know what teams starting XIs will be and what sort of batting order and bowling line up a side will take in the opening salvos.
This presents a potential advantage to a punter against the bookmakers with bookies having to present prices for games a few days in advance of matches to attract a lot of the big money placed on these events – particularly the IPL. This can lead to the opportunity to get later and more up to date information on how a side will line up and who will play in what role nearer to the start and allow your selection to be dictated by this.
The frenetic nature of these 20/20 tournaments see’s games taking place every day and sometimes two per day on a weekend. The result of which sees a rolling narrative for both teams and individuals based on form, results, how pitches are behaving in the tournament and evolving tactics based on all the above criteria.
The nonstop format of big 20/20 tournaments and also rapidly changing dynamic of how teams line up and what plans they may utilise in the future leads to a potential game of cat and mouse between bookmaker and punter in trying to best predict how a team may change or utilise their players dependent of the games and evidence seen in the matches to date.
A team who have been a good example of this from the first game are the Melbourne Renegades. On paper they have a very strong batting line up and an array of 8 players in their side who could bat in most positions in the batting order. This made watching Renegades match’s very interesting from a betting perspective to look at the form of their batting line up and how they would construct their top 6 in the batting order and what prices would be assigned to each player.
Early match’s saw a combination of fine bowling from the Renegades and great form from Cameron White with the bat meaning they won games with only a couple of wickets down and no real knowledge of who was likely to bat and when? – Should more of their batting line up be required.
I touched on last week the fact that I managed to tip Mo Nabi for top run scorer at 55.00 and was sadly a match out, as he was promoted to 4 the very next game and duly won the top run scorer market. This was far from the only example with the Renegades of bookmakers not having any recent knowledge of players and as such not being able to make a fully rounder judgement on a price. I also tipped Tim Luderman at 91.00 for top run scorer for the Renegades in my proofing period, this was based on the knowledge that only last year he was regularly opening the batting for the Strikers and doing a very decent job in the Big Bash and was far from impossible that he could and would be utilised by the Renegades higher up the order at some stage and very possibly in the openers slot that he was used to. You could see the bookmakers thinking of the raw (short term) stats they were going from in this Big Bash – 4 games, has only batted once and made 1 in the innings he played. He did open in the last Renegades match due to international calls ups – and this fact suggests that – there was a very strong chance that, should there have been an injury or change of thinking on the day of a game we could have conceivably had a 90/1 shot walking out to open the batting in a 20/20 match!
Another factor thrown into the mix for this Big Bash aside from the changing form and fortunes of individual players and teams – as each side react to recent events to find their best combinations for each game was a 1-day international series between Australia and England. This caused the rare occurrence of lots of side losing a fair number of players to both of the international teams playing with a lot of the English one-day side already playing the Bash as well as the host nation calling up their own players from the various Big Bash sides.
The form of Cameron White for the Renegades saw the potential of the Renegades losing both White and their captain and opener Finch to the Australian side. Its been already mentioned the depth of the Renegades batting line up and it was a strong possibility that there would be a promotion from the lower order, the two likeliest options were Nabi and Bravo who has both had one go each in the No 4 role. With both players at such big prices it was still profitable to take both players in the market and fortunately it was the far higher priced Bravo who came good at 23.00.
We are now well into the second half of the Big Bash and the likelihood of mass changes and uncertainty looks less likely with the main teams quite settled in their line ups with the knock out stages coming up and judgement on players and tactics more complete. The good news is that the cricketing landscape is seeing more and more 20/20 cricket being played around the world and in these fast and compact formats offering the potential to profit from uncertainty in selection and the ever-changing rotation of players roles in sides.
My Cricket Council service has been proofed daily to BetFan since the 10th November 2017 and it has in that time made +294 Points Profit. January is proving very fruitful with +133 points made in the first 3 weeks of the month.
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