'Players are eliminating themselves'

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5: Players are making the cricket board’s selection of a national team a lot easier as they opt out of training.

A 45-man training squad was named three weeks ago, but so far only a couple handful of players are showing up on a regular basis ahead of the World Cricket League Division 3 tournament to be held in Bermuda from April 28 to May 5.

The top two teams remain alive for a chance to qualify for the Cricket World Cup and advance to the Division 2 tournament. The bottom two squads get dropped into Division 4.

Bermuda will be up against Uganda, Oman, Italy, Nepal and the US.

National cricket team coach David Moore estimates there could be around 70 to 75 training sessions with some players is already close to missing 10 per cent of that total.

The Cricket Board said as part of the selection of the squad: “Players must attend a minimum of 80 per cent of designated training sessions after the squad has been invited to train. Failure to do so may jeopardise the player’s ability to maintain his position in the squad.”

Coach Moore said even though attendance at training has been spotty, he has only had a couple of players signify they are either injured or not interested because they are playing football or rugby.

Moore said: “Other than that, no one has given me any indication that they are not interested in being part of the squad, only that they are not interested in that they are voting with their feet and not coming to training.

"The Bermuda Cricket Board have a selection criteria on the web for everyone to see and that’s the selection criteria they’re going to follow for this tournament. There are some specifics related to attendance and personally, if I was a player, I wouldn’t be testing my luck.”

The team is having a mini-camp this Saturday at the National Sports Centre and the following week the team will move indoors to the facility at BHS to work in the nest due to it getting darker earlier. 

“There are a lot of training session between now and the tournament, but each training session that a player misses is a training session they are getting closer to eliminating themselves from the squad.”