Pothas and Jones offer their expertise
IT IS not often two highly-regarded coaches with impressive CVs including wide-ranging international and franchise experience approach Guernsey to offer their services.
However, it helps when they hold the island and its people in such high regard that they wanted to do their bit in getting Sarnian representative players firing again on the European stage post the Covid-pandemic.
And so, Nic Pothas and Steffan Jones were over at the weekend and will be making regular visits to Guernsey to share their expertise with our present and future stars.
‘Nic was obviously head coach of our national squad for three years and Stef has been across a few times before to help our bowlers, so there were links already there,’ said Guernsey Cricket Board chief executive Mark Latter.
‘Then, at the back end of last year, Nic got in contact with us, said he might have some spare time on his hands and was keen to help us out, so we got him over for our awards night and chatted to him then.’
Jones then came into the equation after speaking with Pothas and suddenly the GCB found they had struck lucky, with Latter getting the backing from the various Island squad managers and coaches.
‘It came out of the blue really and getting two guys of their calibre offering their assistance seemed too good an opportunity to turn down, especially after two years of virtually doing nothing in terms of the national squads, and it gives us a bit of impetus moving forward.’
On his visit at the weekend, Pothas said he was ‘grateful that I can be of some sort of service’.
‘All we’ve really come to do is just to have a look, gather a heap of information, probably reset a few standards that maybe have just fallen by the wayside a little bit over the last few years – accept the fact that around the pandemic it’s been very difficult for the players.
‘When there isn’t anything to play for it’s very hard to keep training, keep doing the right stuff, so a lot of it is information gathering, a lot of it is resetting stuff, but most importantly it’s to set a standard which is set by the players themselves so that it can be administered and policed by the players themselves.’
