Excitement building now Greens know they are going Dutch
Four games from the World Cup. That is the exciting prospect that faces Guernsey next summer now that they know they will be heading to the Netherlands for the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup Europe Qualifier, which will be held from 5-11 July.
The Sarnians were the final team to progress to the five-nation event when they famously beat Denmark at the KGV in August to win their sub-regional qualifier on home soil and while they will be regarded as underdogs when up against the Associate might of the hosts as well as Scotland, Jersey and Italy, Guernsey’s director of cricket Jeremy Frith believes that could be to their benefit.
‘It is literally a round-robin between five teams, the top two will go through and we have genuinely been saying look what happened to us against Finland at Port Soif,’ he said, referring to when the Finns pulled of a major shock by beating the hosts last summer.
‘Yes, we will be playing against top sides – Scotland had a T20 series against Australia just a couple of weeks after we won our tournament and we will be playing them next year – but anything can happen in T20 cricket, as Finland proved against us, and we want to be the team giving others nightmares next summer.’
Frith added that the magnitude of the tournament, with two places at the 2026 T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka at stake, will make it a very different proposition to that which Guernsey faced in the sub-regional qualifier with official warm-up matches and practice days included in the schedule.
‘It will be more the pace of the World Cup, so a different challenge to the one we had here last summer,’ he said.
‘I know the players are looking forward to it. They had known about the potential for it to be in Holland for a while, but now it has been confirmed we can crack on now.
‘Hopefully we are going to announce a fixture schedule in the new year building towards Holland and also following on off the back of it as well because we see the tournament as a stepping stone for us rather than a cliff edge.
‘It is part of the bigger picture and we want to be in the mix in this sort of tournament consistently and not for this to be just a one-off. We are going there to give it everything and also to learn so that we can come back and do better and better.’
Guernsey Under-19s have also discovered that their ICC U19 Men’s Cricket World Cup Europe Qualifier will be in Scotland from 31 July to 5 August next year.
In that 50-over event, the Sarnians will come up against the hosts, Denmark, Jersey, the Netherlands and Sweden.
