Warriors brace for rare big occasion against defending champs

South Africa’s silly season starts on Friday and not just because it’s the final of the franchise T20 competition. December 16 is a public holiday and its timing – nine days before Christmas – allows it to serve as a marker for the start of the festive break. It’s when summer is at its sexiest with blue skies, braais and temperatures touching 30 degrees throughout the country.

From next year, if all goes to plan, it will be the day South Africa’s new city-based, eight-team T20 extravaganza concludes. The franchise twenty-over trophy will still exist but could lose profile, so the Titans and the Warriors have the chance to make the last big splash.

They ended first and second on the table respectively – although Warriors had to win a playoff to secure their spot in the final – and according to Titans coach Mark Boucher, it will be a “fitting end” to a hard-fought tournament. “Whichever way it goes, whoever picks up a trophy tomorrow, both sides will say they are the deserved winners. Both teams have played good cricket over the whole competition,” he said.

Here’s how things shape up:

The teams

Titans are under a new coach after Rob Walter left for New Zealand, but the transition to Boucher was seamless. They top the first-class points table at the halfway stage and finished top after the group stages of the T20 Challenge, with seven wins from 10 matches. They have a good mix of experience, led by Albie Morkel, Farhaan Behardien and Tabraiz Shamsi, and exciting youngsters to complete a well-balanced line-up. “The successful teams that I was privileged enough to play in, the teams sort of ran itself with a strong core of senior players. That’s no different in this dressing room. It’s no use having one captain in the side, you’ve got to have a couple of guys who are playing leadership roles and that’s something that’s a strength of ours,” Boucher said.

Warriors, on the other hand have underwhelmed for several seasons. They’ve struggled to hold on to big-name players but have started to find some consistency in Malibongwe Maketa’s second full season in charge. They lie third on the first-class points table – a focus for them because Maketa believes “if you nail your four-day skills, you can always transfer them to the other competitions,” and had big wins in the T20 competition to finish second, with six wins. “It’s exciting. It’s almost like the first final exam with the work we’ve put in over the last 18 months. There will be pressure because it’s a final but we trust our skills and our processes,” Maketa said.

The captains

Albie Morkel was asked to captain the Titans in T20s last season and Boucher has kept him …

continue reading in source www.espncricinfo.com