The ‘Passing-through’ League

Wed, Mar 22, '17

It only took his second match in charge for Kyle Hope to come to grips with the realities of life down at the bottom of the Professional Cricket League. League leaders and defending champions Guyana Jaguars put his team under pressure from the very first day and never really lost their grip on a match which ended within the first hour of the final day.Hope’s Trinidad and Tobago Red Force dug a deep pit for themselves by only scoring 202 in their first innings. 

For the record, all of the first seven Red Force batsmen reached double figures and all but one of those got 20 or more, yet none got further than Isaiah Rajah’s 41.In assessing that performance, the skipper said: “A lot of us got starts and we did not carry on but I guess that is where the inexperience showed a little bit. It was a difficult day, batting-wise. It was difficult to score quickly and we did try to apply ourselves. We were 60-odd for one going into lunch; that showed we did fight but we did not carry on,”

In the second innings, the pattern was the same, more or less. Rajah got into the 40s for the second time, Yannic Cariah got into the 30s again, West Indies opener Evin Lewis reached the 20s once more and all-rounder Imran Khan got 28 to go with his 36 from the first knock. I hear the skipper venturing “inexperience” as a factor for the first innings failure. Maybe he needed to check his figures.Of the top seven in the order, only Rajah could really be classified as a newcomer to first-class cricket with five games behind him. 

read more at Trinidad Express