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The cricket season is barely a week old and we've already started off on the wrong foot. The season has begun in turmoil.

Games are starting late and we're now down to just seven teams in the Premier Division.
We knew that Police were going to pull out and we tried to replace them with the Under-19s and that didn't work out either. With just seven teams, it means every match day there will be a team that has a bye and that's just not good for what's supposed to be our top level of cricket.

The Under-19s haven't been replaced and they should have been with the third place team from the First Division or with Social Club, who came in seventh. Even if the two teams had a playoff to see which one could move up, that would have been better.
It should be an eight-team division.

Arnold Manders, the director of cricket, said we should be playing more four-day cricket after travelling with the national team. Where has he been the last five years? We've been playing that.

A week after he says that, we scrap open cricket. What sense does that make?
We're not developing our youngsters.

We should be adding trophies, not taking them away. We're down to playing for three trophies this season - The BELCO Cup, the league and 20-20. There's less incentive to keep guys out all year when there's so little to play for.

We should have a Champion of Champions.

A lot of people turned out for the BELCO Cup final. There's hardly going to be anyone turn out for league cricket.

At the end of the season we're going to see defaults again as players lose interest.
We only have leagues for Under-17s so those players who are 18 to 23, if they can't make their first team, then they don't have anywhere to play. We are struggling with them in our society now.

With just league cricket, clubs are going to have to play their best teams until they fall out of the race.

The structure for this season is terrible and appalling.

With the Americas Tournament coming up, we have three weeks of no local cricket. No where else in the world do you stop local cricket while international cricket is going on.

We could have had another competition or played some open cricket during this time. We have 200 other cricketers not playing the sport for the sake of 14 involved in the national wrong.

I don't know how we got so many things so wrong.

BELCO Cup

It was a well-deserved win by PHC for the BELCO Cup. It was obvious they looked like the best-prepared team. St. David's did as well as could be expected considering we only had four or five guys out regularly for training.

St. David's got what it deserved. You can't play just off of talent. There are no excuses - the best team won.

PHC says it doesn't have any stars, but I don't see it that way. They have a lot of experienced players that have played for Bermuda at some point in time.

They did the hard work in the preseason and they reaped the rewards. They will be one of the contenders for the league.[[In-content Ad]]

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