Home advantage could be vital as Greens face Denmark in final

Having already completed their round-robin matches with their crucial win over Estonia on Sunday, the Sarnians had an anxious wait to see whether Finland or Estonia could pull off a big-enough victory yesterday to overtake the hosts at the top of the group two table on net run-rate.

Estonia’s task against Malta was a virtually impossible one, while Finland were always unlikely to beat Bulgaria by enough and having set the latter 200 for victory, once the Finnish bowlers had conceded 20 runs in reply, Guernsey were through to today’s showpiece match.

Tom Nightingale hopes the hosts will now rise to the occasion.

‘Every two years this kind of tournament happens, so you’ve just got to make the most of it and enjoy it. That’s how we’ve been going about our cricket all year, just enjoying it and that’s when we play our best cricket,’ said the Guernsey vice-captain, who added that confidence in the group is ‘very good’.

‘It’s going to be a good day hopefully. We’ve peaked at the right time – a big win on Sunday, played really well, everyone did their job and we’re just looking forward to the final.’

Denmark had to beat Cyprus yesterday to leapfrog Spain in group one and they did so convincingly at the KGV with the tournament’s leading run-scorer Hamid Shah making a brilliant 91 out of his side’s 205 for 4.

The impressive Danish attack then restricted Cyprus to 63 for 9 to win by 142 runs.

‘They don’t seem to have had really any close games, which kind of probably benefits us to be honest, because obviously the Spain game that they had was rained off,’ said Nightingale in assessing Denmark.

‘Apart from that, they’ve just seemed to have dominated and not a lot of their batters seem to have had the opportunity to actually play and score some runs.

‘So they look similar to us really, just a really well-drilled side and they’ve played well obviously.’

Nightingale hopes that home advantage could make the difference in today’s final and has encouraged spectators to show their support for the team as they did on the weekend.

‘We had a good crowd on Sunday, a really big crowd, probably the biggest crowd that any of the boys have played in front of and we played really well,’ he said.

‘You never know when you have a crowd like that because some people aren’t used to it, but they’ve gone and played really well under pressure, so the support was good.

‘It’s always nice when you have lots of people around. Standing on the other side of the pitch when I was fielding [looking back towards the clubhouse], it’s like you’re playing in a County Championship match or a Blast game or something – it was really good.’

• Today’s final between Guernsey and Denmark starts at 3.30pm at the KGV.