Coach Manders warns Bermuda against slow T20 start

Bermuda head coach Arnold Manders warned his players they can’t afford a sluggish start when the T20 World Cup qualifiers get under way on Monday.

The team have been afflicted by poor starts to tournaments before and Manders said that issue had been addressed during their extensive preparations, which began in October.

He said: “That’s exactly what we’ve talked about because from talking to the players they say we start off late and lose one, two games and have to fight to get back in.  It’s what we’ve been trying to instil in them — that when we get off the plane on Sunday we need to get off not walking but running. I think the boys are up for it and I hope things go our way.”

Manders said that the bowling performances of the team in Barbados during a recent warm-up tour bodes well for the intensive T20 round robin.

And he highlights the return of the absent middle order as another key ingredient into why there should be no excuses for failing to finish in the top-two places and making it to the next stage of qualification in Dubai in October.

He said: “If we play to our potential we should qualify but it’s a case of being smart and making the right decisions.

“If they do that, and they’ve been drilled at that since I took over, then I think we should be fine.

“Right now the bowling attack is our strength. We have an additional spinner in Jacobi Robinson, we also have Rodney [Trott], Sammy Robinson and Dion Stovell.

“Dion has done extremely well at T20 tournaments previously. If we take what we did in Barbados where our bowling and fielding was up to par, maybe our batting wasn’t...

“But when you look at it, the bulk of our middle order was left in Bermuda or England with David Hemp, Stephen [Outerbridge], Lionel Cann and Malachi Jones, that’s our middle order.

“I think we did extremely well in Barbados and with the four joining in our batting is pretty deep.”

He added: “We’ve been training since October so we have a lot of things put in place in terms of training and tactics.

“The board had the foresight to get us out to Barbados in February and we played several 50 over matches. We were supposed to play more T20 we played one, but we have some preoaration outdoors."