By Neto Baptiste
The coach of the Antigua and Barbuda senior men’s cricket team, Pernel Watley, said he will recommend to the Antigua and Barbuda Cricket Association (ABCA) that the core of the squad that competed in the Leeward Islands Cricket Board (LICB) Three Day Tournament is offered specialised training.
Watley’s statement comes on the heels of the tournament jointly held in St Kitts and Nevis during which a number of the country’s young players were exposed to outside competition for the first time.
The coach said exposure to structured coaching could benefit the youngsters.
“This is one of the recommendations and not only from me but from senior players like Rahkeem Cornwall and some of the other guys because of structure where some of the clubs don’t practice every day. We plan to keep a core of the guys together at least two days per week, and on the weekends they can go and play for their clubs. We know it is going to be a fight and it’s going to be a challenge, but it’s not an everyday thing; it’s just to keep the guys together so that everybody would be on the same page,” he said.
Watley said that having worked with the players over the past few weeks has allowed him to identify areas in need of improvement.
“What I noticed when the guys came to training first, fitness was one of the things where most of them — not the franchise guys, the youngsters — were lacking. When we said it was time to warm up, if you don’t tell them to run five laps they would just run one or two laps, and fitness is the key. The way you structure your practice, you have to be working on something instead of everybody coming and somebody bowling and somebody batting … you’d need somebody like a coach to correct the mistakes and identify their weakness and their strengths,” the coach said.
Overall, Watley expressed satisfaction with the team’s performance over the three matches.
“We haven’t played three-day cricket for a number of years, maybe over 10 years, and we only had one rest day just before and after a match, so I must give them credit. It was an all-round performance and if you check the stats we did well in batting, bowling [and] fielding. Some of the things we need to look at going forward is to be able to bat for longer periods without playing rash strokes, to be a bit more patient when bowling and to be able to put the ball in one area all the time. We dropped a few catches so we need to look at that too,” he said.
Antigua and Barbuda Master Blasters won two and drew one of their three matches in the tournament. They opened their campaign with an eight-wicket triumph over Anguilla on February 20 before beating neighbours Montserrat by 222 runs and then drawing against Nevis in their final match.