Greens need to pick themselves up quickly
GUERNSEY have to bounce back quickly from being on the wrong end of a whitewash at the hands of the old enemy over the weekend.
That was the message from captain Josh Butler who saw his side suffer the disappointment of losing in a ‘super over’ in Friday night’s opening match of the InfrasoftTech T20I Inter-Insular series after the two teams had finished tied at the College Field before falling to comprehensive back-to-back defeats at the KGV on Saturday.
‘If you win a close game, you are always on a high, but to be fair I don’t think that had too much of a bearing – we were quite positive after Friday,’ Butler said.
‘Obviously a super over can go either way so we took it on the chin.
‘But today [Saturday] we arrived and straight from the off we didn’t hit our areas and paid the price.’
Guernsey are straight back into action in four games against the visiting Netherlands A squad starting tomorrow as part of their preparations for the ICC T20 World Cup Europe Final event that starts here on Saturday 15 June.
‘The Dutch will be tough. We are trying to drill it into the lads that, yes, we might be losing, but we’ve got to learn from it,’ Butler said.
‘We feel Jersey are going to be the best team in the [ICC] tournament, they are well organised, they are well drilled, and they are going to be just as strong, if not stronger, with the players they are bringing over.
‘It is trying to showcase that if someone has a good day, we can do it, but we are playing very good teams so it’s trying to be positive and it’s exciting that, as we showed on Friday against who we think is going to be the best team in the tournament, we came very close to getting over that line.’
Jersey captain Chuggy Perchard said his side’s success over the weekend was the result of a lot of hard work over several years and made a little bit more special now that inter-insular T20s hold international status.
‘When you are out there playing, you don’t really regard them with T20 International status, but I suppose when we look back in years to come it will be something we’re really proud of,’ he said before adding that Jersey will be full of confidence going into the Europe Final event.
Match reports and scorecards in Monday's Guernsey Press.
