Forget fly-by-night franchise leagues and celebrate top-flight derby delights

In-play cricket betting can be a demanding exercise as punters assess changing pitch and weather conditions, required run-rates, one team's depth of batting talent and the other side's bowling plans.

Then there's the knowledge that if a game ever threatens to become too exciting, the umpires will take the players off for bad light.

And with all this going on, cricket bettors are still expected to remember the names of the teams involved which, in the era of global franchise leagues, is far from straightforward.

The newest of these leagues is South Africa's SA20, featuring teams run by six Indian Premier League franchise owners, which started with Wednesday's fixture between Paarl Royals and MI Cape Town (the 'MI' refers to their owners' IPL team Mumbai Indians).

After cheering home my first-wicket runs bet on, I think, MI Cape Town, it was reassuring to focus on a Premier League coupon featuring such heritage fixtures as Manchester United versus Manchester City and Tottenham versus Arsenal.

The threat of a European Super League may have been staved off for now but we should never take these illustrious derbies for granted.

They are rare flowers, which must be nurtured with genuine care and love rather than artificial hype. It's not as simple as having two clubs who are embittered by geographical proximity and decades of playing in the same division.

The Liverpool-Everton derby ticks those boxes but has become a mundane fixture in recent seasons because of the chasm between the teams. Everton are generally on a damage-limitation mission – four of the last ten league meetings ended 0-0 – and there has been only one red card in the last 15 derbies, to the disappointment of neutrals hoping for some old-fashioned Merseyside mayhem.

In Manchester the balance of power has shifted too quickly for the good of the derby. United were the city's dominant force but their fall coincided with City's rise to become the best team in Europe – alright, they haven't won the Champions League yet but they're 7-4 favourites going into the last 16 which must be worth some kind of trophy – so evenly-contested derby games have been rare.

Even now, with United rejuvenated under Erik ten Hag, the Citizens are odds-on to win at Old Trafford, having been 4-0 up at half-time in October's 6-3 rout in the reverse fixture.

So for the purest and most competitive of the Premier League derbies, we must head to north London.

Tottenham and Arsenal's fortunes in the 21st century have ebbed and flowed with pleasing symbiosis and, at least over the past decade, neither club has managed to establish regional supremacy for long.

There are some strong historical trends in this fixture: goals are guaranteed, Harry Kane usually scores a penalty, and home advantage is huge – Tottenham haven't won at Arsenal in the league since November 2010 while the Gunners' last league victory at Spurs came in 2013-14.

But both clubs have a self-destructive streak which adds a dash of jeopardy to any derby clash and, crucially, they have been remarkably well-matched over the past decade.

By my back-of-an-envelope calculations, in the last ten full Premier League seasons, Tottenham have amassed 701 points and Arsenal 692.

Add in this term's tallies and the Gunners have inched ahead by 736 points to 734. Those figures tell the tale of a proper, organic sporting feud and no gaudy franchise league fixture between North London Super Kings and South London Sunrisers could rival Spurs-Arsenal.

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