The CPL Opens on Friday with a New Team and a Ground That Has Never Hosted One
Jamaica Kingsmen play the first match in their history against the Antigua and Barbuda Falcons at Arnos Vale on 7 August. Rovman Powell captains, Andre Russell bats, and the Caribbean Premier League runs to seven teams for the first time.
The Caribbean Premier League starts on Friday 7 August, and the opening night has been arranged with a pleasing symmetry: a team playing its first match, at a ground hosting its first match.
Kingsmen against Falcons, at Arnos Vale
The Jamaica Kingsmen, new to the competition this season, meet the Antigua and Barbuda Falcons at the Arnos Vale Stadium in St Vincent and the Grenadines, which stages CPL cricket for the first time.
The Kingsmen have built around two names Caribbean crowds already know. Rovman Powell captains the side and Andre Russell bats in it, and among their early picks was Vitel Lawes, a leg spinner from the last Under 19 World Cup. It is a squad assembled to be watchable from its first ball.
The Falcons answer with Imad Wasim as captain and Paul Nixon as coach, with Shadab Khan among their overseas signings. Two captains who have spent their careers being handed the ball in the difficult overs is not the worst way to begin a tournament.
Seven teams, for the first time
This is the first CPL contested by seven sides. Thirty nine matches run from 7 August to 20 September, with the knockouts across three days in the middle of September and the final at the Kensington Oval in Barbados on 20 September. The Trinbago Knight Riders start as the defending champions.
One number on Russell, and an honest limit
Our own ball-by-ball database does not cover the CPL, so we cannot tell you what Russell has done in this competition and will not pretend otherwise.
What we can tell you is what he has done in the T20 cricket we do hold. Across every innings of his in our database he has hit 330 sixes from 2,299 legal deliveries faced. That is a six roughly every seven balls, which over a career is the sort of rate that does not really have a comparison.
At 38 he is not the player who once made that look routine every night. He is still, on the evidence of the deliveries we hold, the most direct route a T20 innings has to a boundary.
Why the expansion is the real story
A seventh franchise means more fixtures, a longer group stage and more contracts in a part of the cricketing world where the domestic game has not always been able to offer them. In a month when much of the calendar is quiet, the Caribbean has chosen to make its tournament bigger. We will follow it as it goes.