Ganga’s men confident of beating Bajans

TRINIDAD and Tobago cricket captain Daren Ganga and team will be seeking to create history in Barbados in their Carib Beer Cricket Series second round match at the Crab Hill Ground, St Lucy starting tomorrow. Having secured four points from their first round no decision clash with Guyana, Ganga feels very confident that his team will come away with honours against the Barbadians. TT will once again be courting history after they trounced the Barbadians in the 2004 Presi-dent’s Cup competition twice.

Ganga is optimistic that they will return victorious but the unpredictable weather conditions could play ‘spoil sport’ and affect their overall team plan.  “We are going to Barbados and will be seeking to win the match outright. They are playing at home and will start with that advantage. “But in the President’s Cup competition last year, we showed everyone that we can beat the best team on any given day. And we will approach this game with positive feelings of coming out on top once again,” he said. “We know the history of the matches between these two teams but we are not looking backwards. We are playing with a different mind set of being successful and we just have to stick to our plan and we will reap the rewards for our efforts.

“The players know that no game is easy and are fully aware that we have to fight harder, every session. We have to grit it out for longer periods and then we will get the advantage on our side,” Ganga said. Commenting on the team’s composition for their clash with the Barbadians, Ganga pointed out that the decision will be made taking into consideration the toss and the state of the pitch. He is concerned about the batsmen’s lack of consistency. “With Tishan Maraj, who is a regular opening batsman, available gives us another option in the batting line-up. (Lendl) Simmons opened with Sherwin (Ganga) against Guyana but now with Tishan in the squad, we will decide whether to start with him and Sherwin and utilise Simmons in the middle-order,” he said. “We had a good start against Guyana but the rest of the batting did not click. We decided to take a few risks in trying to get the first innings points in that match. In the end, we had to settle for the four points,” Ganga said.

TT Squad: Daren Ganga (captain), Tishan Maraj, Sherwin Ganga, Lendl Simmons, Imran Jan, Denesh Ramdin, Shazam Babwah, Samuel Badree, Richard Kelly, Rayad Emrit, Kyron Lynch, Dave Mohammed and Amit Jaggernauth. The officials are Giles Antoine (manager) and David Williams (coach).