All matches played in the 2021 edition of the CPL will be played at Warner Park, in St Kitts and Nevis. Let’s have a look at how playing here can impact the online cricket satta bazar rates given for the league.
So it’s good to tell you all about the history of the ground, what type of bowlers have done well here, the capacity allowed at the ground, what an average first-innings score might be and if there’s a betting angle to the ground.
Spoiler alert: there is!
Due to the ongoing pandemic, the West Indies Cricket Board and organisers of the CPL decided that it made sense to hold the whole tournament at just the one venue.
In this case, Warner Park in St Kitts and Nevis.
That’s in order to make it easier to have a secured bio-bubble and to limit the possibility of outbreaks of Covid-19 that could disrupt the tournament.
Which is precisely what happened at both the PSL and Indian Premier League earlier this year.
It will also make things far easier for players, management, fans, broadcasters, journalists and everyone else that there’s no travel involved.
Last year for the same reason (Covid-19) the CPL took the decision to host the majority of matches at the Brian Lara Academy in Tarouba, Trinidad.
The other matches were played at the Queen’s Oval in Port of Spain, also Trinidad.
So there’s a precedent for holding the whole of the CPL on the same island, although in this case it will only be at one venue, rather than two.
Named after the English 17th century explorer Sir Thomas Warner, it was the first of the new Caribbean stadiums to be opened ahead of the 2006 (ODI) World Cup, which Australia won.
Unlike most of the other venues, it was mostly funded with money from Taiwan, rather than China.
The complex is mostly divided into a football stadium and a cricket stadium, though it also includes tennis courts, netball and volleyball courts.
The football stadium holds 3,500 spectators and the cricket one 8,000.
Doesn’t sound like much compared to say the MCG in Melbourne, which once had 100,000 fans in it?
Maybe not, but it’s worth pointing out that the whole island of St Kitts has a population of just 35,000 so you could put just under a quarter of the whole island in the stadium and it would be full!
For the 2021 edition of the CPL, the ground will operate at half capacity, meaning up to 4,000 fans will be allowed to enter he ground for each match.
And that’s as long as they can prove they’ve been vaccinated.
In order to make an accurate cricket prediction for any game, it’s important to know what has happened here in the past. Warner Park has hosted Test matches, ODIs and T20Is involving the West Indies, plus a few other matches not involving the Windies, at the 2006 World Cup.
Because of its limited capacity, the West Indies Cricket Board rarely uses the ground for big international matches, preferring to use it for games against slightly weaker cricketing nations like Bangladesh, Ireland or Afghanistan.
Against this trio of teams they’re unbeaten but they did suffer a couple of really heavy defeats against England in T20Is played there.
It is of course also the home of the St Kitts and Nevis Patriots in the CPL.
Not that it’s necessarily been a happy hunting ground for them.
They’ve consistently been just about the weakest side in the CPL since it began, having just one runners-up spot to show for their efforts over the years.
Proof of their struggles is that they’ve finished rock bottom in three of the six seasons they’ve been in the CPL.
That’s a tough question!
In terms of which bowlers have had lots of success here, the answer tends to bee: mostly spinners.
In Test matches played at this venue, the only player to have taken five wickets in an innings was Indian legendary off-spinner Harbhajan Singh, who claimed 5-147, in a drawn Test match against the West Indies back in 2006.
In ODIs, Mitchell Johnson (2016) and Sunil Narine (2012) have taken five wickets in an innings while South African legspinner Imran Tahir took 7-45 for the Proteas against the Windies in 2016, a game SA won.
What do three of those four (the exception being Johnson) have in common? They’re all spinners.
Looking back at the 2019 edition, the last one before 2021 when there were matches here at Warner Park, here are the first innings scores:
So as you can see, there was a somewhat freakishly low score of 121 but for the most part first innings scores at Warner Park are pretty high and certainly much higher than they are at the majority of the other CPL grounds.
All Indian betting sites will not be happy that we gave you this information! Across all matches played in ODIs, T20Is and CPL matches there has been a strong bias towards the team who fields first.
In many ways that’s typical of a high-scoring ground anywhere in the world. Just look at somewhere like Bangalore in India or Trent Bridge in England.
Why is that?
Hard to say but probably the main reason is that very often teams go too hard and end up with below-par scores because they take too many risks after losing too many early wickets, safely in the knowledge that it’s a chasing ground.
Or it could go the other way where they don’t know what a good first innings score is, are too cautious and end up not scoring enough runs, which are then chased pretty comfortably by the team batting second.
The wider point, however, is that it’s a wicket that doesn’t get any worse as the game progresses.
So it favours a team batting second, who knows what the target is and can bat on a wicket as good as it was in the first innings.
But know how they need to go about their business in terms of chasing the target.
So when betting, especially in live betting, bear in mind that he chasing team has a considerable advantage.
