Griffins skipper Kirk relishing CI League challenge

Although their domestic campaign ended with their first defeat as Cobo won the concluding T20 at the KGV, Tom Kirk’s men had already been crowned, having won their first five matches, and the skipper was a happy man to get his hands on a piece of silverware his side missed out on last season.

‘It’s always nice to get to get one back,’ Kirk said.

‘We didn’t have our strongest season last season, so to get to get one on the board early is very pleasing, especially when we came into the season not knowing how strong we’d be at the start.

‘We’re missing a couple [of players] that we’ll get back and then try and move into the CI now and try to defend what is a tough competition to win.’

He added that this year’s championship format of one round of 40-over games and another of T20s was ‘different’, but a ‘good mix’.

‘The T20 is good and obviously we’ve got the [ICC] competition at the end of the season, so it made a lot of sense to play T20s in there, but also you want to keep some form of longer cricket otherwise we’d be playing T20 all year and then trying to get into a CI league where I don’t think we’re giving ourselves a great shout as Guernsey teams if we haven’t played any long form stuff.’

Kirk felt that while everyone had contributed to their early-season success, he singled out Adam Martel and Luke Bichard for their impact.

‘They’ve performed really well in the competition both with bat and ball. The rest of us contributed, but we’ve kind of built around them and they’ve stood up really well for us.’

Of all formats though, Griffins are arguably best suited to the 50-over CI League.

‘Historically in this competition we’ve done pretty well, so yeah, the longer form stuff seems to seems to favour us,’ said Kirk, whose side begin their title defence on 29 June.

‘We’re looking forward to it. It’s always good to play the Jersey teams as well.’