The 15th edition of Australia’s men’s Big Bash League starts on Sunday, immediately after the women’s competition ends on Saturday. <\/p>\n
The T20 franchise tournament clashes with Australia’s home Test summer as usual and will run until 25 January. <\/p>\n
There are 44 matches in total – 40 in the group stage and four in the knockouts.<\/p>\n
Eight teams are taking part: Adelaide Strikers, Brisbane Heat, Hobart Hurricanes, Melbourne Renegades, Melbourne Stars, Perth Scorchers, Sydney Sixers and Sydney Thunder. <\/p>\n
Hobart Hurricanes are the defending champions after beating Sydney Thunder by seven wickets in last year’s final.<\/p>\n
The eight sides play each other twice in the group stage, with the top four progressing to the knockouts, which work as follows:<\/p>\n
20 January – Qualifier: First v second (08:15 GMT)<\/p>\n
21 January – Knockout: Third v fourth (08:15 GMT)<\/p>\n
23 January – Challenger: Loser of Qualifier v winner of Knockout (08:15 GMT)<\/p>\n
25 January – Final: Winner of Qualifier v winner of Challenger (08:15 GMT)<\/p>\n
Listen to commentary on selected Big Bash matches on BBC Sounds. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 15th edition of Australia’s men’s Big Bash League starts on Sunday, immediately after the women’s competition ends…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-313021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cricket","8":"tag-cricket","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}