GT20 Canada: Montreal Tigers vs Edmonton Royals – Preview

Match details

Global T20 Canada 2019

Montreal Tigers vs Edmonton Royals

CAA Centre, Brampton, Ontario

July 31, 2019

10:00 PM IST

Predicted lineups

Montreal Tigers

Kyle Coetzer, Sunil Narine, Ruvindu Gunasekera, Dinesh Chandimal, Anton Devcich, George Bailey, Matthew Cross, Nikhil Dutta, Mohammad Naveed, Dillon Heyliger, Sean Abbott

Edmonton Royals

Navneet Dhaliwal, Richie Berrington, Faf du Plessis, Mohammad Hafeez, James Neesham, Ben Cutting, Shadab Khan, Safyaan Sharif, Anshuman Rath, Kyle Phillip, Akash Gill

Preview

Two struggling teams, Montreal Tigers and Edmonton Royals, will take each other on in the ninth match of the tournament at the CAA Centre in Brampton on Wednesday.

While the Montreal Tigers won their first match by 24 runs (D/L method), they lost the very next match by a massive margin of 10 wickets. They looked on course to lose the match against the Vancouver Knights, who posted a massive total of 276/3 batting first, as well but the match got abandoned and they somehow sneaked out a point from it.

The issue which came to the fore during the last two matches was their bowling incompetence. Sunil Narine has looked totally off-colour and the other bowlers have looked no match for the batsmen playing in this tournament. It looks like the batsmen will need to post huge totals every time to give the bowlers a chance of defending it somehow.

The Edmonton Royals, on the other hand, have started their campaign with back-to-back losses despite having a well-rounded squad. The one thing which was visible in these two matches was their death bowling woes. The Toronto Nationals chased down their target of 192 runs despite being 125/7 at one stage. Moreover, Shahid Afridi smacked their bowlers for 80 off just 40 deliveries in the next match to highlight this issue further. However, their batting lineup is good and  almost each and every batsman has contributed in the two matches so far, even though we are yet to see a big individual score from them.

However, we might get to see that right in this match considering how weak Montreal’s bowling lineup is. The likes of Faf du Plessis, Richie Berrington, Jimmy Neesham and Ben Cutting would love to get big scores in this match. The Royals will be the favourites to defend or even chase down a total. The likes of Shadab Khan and Saafiyan Sharif are real wicket-takers and, hence, they would like to prove their worth by powering the Royals to their first win of the season in this match. (see latest cricket update news simulcast here)

Written by: Prasenjit Dey