Middle-earth: Shadow of War
13 January 2023
Donburi: all the fancy, less of the faff
23 January 2023
On the 10th of January 2023, the SA20 league started in South Africa, the first game was played in Cape Town (my old stomping grounds), after years of teasing and failed T20 leagues in South Africa, we finally seem to have a good formula, only time will tell if it lasts. Personally, I really love the look of it so far, the teams were bought by IPL teams so there is continuity and I think there is nothing wrong with that, there are many reasons why the IPL is the biggest league in the world.
The opening game was played in Cape Town as I mentioned, MI Cape Town vs Paarl Royals (please don’t worry, I am not going to go into every game haha but being the opener, I wanted to talk about it). The home team bowled first and after some back and forth with some great bowling and some impressive late-stage batting, the standouts of the batting: Jos Buttler and David Miller – was amazing watching those two at the crease together. Standout bowlers were Jofra Archer in his first game back from injury almost all of last year and Olly Stone, pure pace! Paarl Royals made 142-7, which I thought was not a terrible score, Newlands is not known for being the highest-scoring track even though it is quite a small ground.
Then MI came out to bat and let me tell you that the openers Brevis (Baby AB) and Rickelton were incredible, Player of the Match was Brevis and it was a hell of a knock if you didn’t know him before that you certainly did after. 70 runs from 41 balls 4-4s and 5-6s with a strike rate of 170.73 (in cricket speak that is good).
I am quite fond of this new format personally but that is because I want more young players to start filtering through, our test team and ODI team need a youth infusion, these new-generation cricketers are what we want and perhaps desperately need. I remember when we were the number 1 test team in the world, and I remember when we were at the top of all three formats in 2012, if we are wanting to get back to those peaks, we need to adapt and this is the way we can.
