Shots and Edges - JSK and Pretoria Capitals
The Gauteng sides announced pre-signings, are they good?
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Joburg Super Kings and Pretoria Capitals unveiled two pre-signings each. JSK seems to have re-evaluated their approach to overseas signings and also chose to bolster their bowling attack. However, are these signings as good as they appear on the surface?
Pretoria Capitals, on the other hand, invested in their top order. Their style of play has always been easy to read, they want batters who take full advantage of the powerplay, there is no better example of that than their opening pair of Phil Salt and Will Jacks in the first two seasons. Do Will Smeed and Rahmanullah Gurbaz fit the bill?
Joburg Super Kings
Tabraiz Shamsi
Only three cricketers have won seven or more Player of the Match awards for the Proteas. AB de Villiers won seven in 78 T20Is, David Miller has nine in 122 innings, and Tabraiz Shamsi is tied with Miller, but from fewer matches. He has done it in 70 outings. No other South African bowler has had such an impact in the format. He also has a Player of the Series award in T20Is to his name.
Let’s use stats to explain that impact. Shamsi has conceded 502.5 runs less than expected in T20Is at a true economy of 0.64 and has a true wickets value of 22.57. These are outstanding numbers. Any bowler with stats like these is a keeper. That’s why Faf du Plessis ran around to ensure that JSK gets his signature for the 2025 season.
With Aaron Phangiso's exit, JSK needed someone to partner with Imran Tahir and they couldn't have done better than Shamsi.
Shot.
Jonny Bairstow
Jonny Bairstow smashed his way to a third 50 in The Hundred with an excellent slog sweep off Rashid Khan. He faced 41 deliveries on his way to the milestone. He smashed seven of the 10 fours his side recorded, and he hit two more fours than their opposition, the Trent Rockets. Welsh Fire, Bairstow’s team, went on to win the match.
Bairstow’s current form bodes well for JSK. Last year, the Yorkshire batter averaged 19 at a strike rate of 99 in T20 franchise cricket and 21.75 at 96.67 in The Hundred. However, despite that drastic drop, Bairstow still boasts an overall average of 30.47 at a strike rate of 137.74. Part of that reason is his rediscovery of form.
Earlier in the year, he averaged 29.8 at 152.8 for true stats of 2.7 at 16.4 in the IPL. This was not as good as his career IPL true stats of an average of 6.16 at 19.75, but he is on course to his best version.
 Bairstow averages 29.83 at 137.53 in T20Is. When you convert that to true stats, Bairstow has a true average of 8.11 at a true strike rate of 12.33.
Bairstow was one of the batters who helped Eoin Morgan reinvent England's white-ball approach. He is as belligerent as they come and enjoys attacking bowlers. JSK has found someone who can help them take advantage of the first six overs.
Shot.
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Pretoria Capitals
Will Smeed
While Will Smeed might be an unknown quantity in South African cricket, the 22-year-old has made his mark in The Hundred, Vitality Blast, The Bangladesh Premier League, the Pakistan Super League, the Caribbean Premier League, and Abu Dhabi’s ILT20 and T10 leagues. Smeed is such a T20 merchant he has played almost 100 T20s and only 1 official List A match in his nascent career.
Smeed is such a big impact player that he smashed The Hundred’s first-ever century in 2022, a sensational unbeaten 101 from 50 deliveries. Since then, only Will Jacks (108), Tammy Beaumont (118), and Harry Brook (105) have reached the milestone.
Smeed has scored over 2000 runs in T20s and 71.57% of those runs have come off boundaries. He boasts an impressive boundary percentage of 4.3. But nothing expresses his impact like his true stats, a true average of 2.25 at a true strike rate of 22.3.
Smeed is part of the next generation of batters in the mould of Jake Fraser-McGurk, youngsters who will try to score as many runs off a single delivery. They present the next step in the evolution of T20 cricket. He embodies the Capitals' ethos.
Shot.
Rahmanullah Gurbaz
Only two openers registered three half-centuries at the 2024 T20 World Cup, Rohit Sharma and Gurbaz. The Afghanistan opener finished the tournament with the highest run tally and bragging rights for hitting the most sixes. In fact, Afghanistan’s campaign with the bat was built around his opening partnership with Ibrahim Zadran. The duo scored most of Afghanistan's runs at the event. For the most part, it looked as if the Afghans only had two batters. So instead of playing his natural attacking game, Gurbaz went at a strike rate of 124.34.
Under normal circumstances, in T20Is, Gurbaz averages 26.3 at a rate of 135.5 for an outstanding true average of 5.68 at an insane 30.53, and an average of 23.4 at an even more impressive 150.4 in T20s. The opener is a high-impact powerplay batter and nothing explains this better than his overall true stats across all forms of T20 cricket. His average is just slightly above par, at 0.1, while his true strike rate is at an astronomical 27.65.
The trio of Will Jacks, Will Smeed and Rahmanullah Gurbaz is almost guaranteed to give Pretoria Capitals a blistering start with the bat to set the middle order a platform to launch from.
Shot.
True stats (true average and true strike rate) used in this article are provided by the good people at Good Areas, who have an outstanding algorithm that compares expected stats to achieved stats based on conditions.