Guyana plays their opening match of the second Champions League Twenty20 tournament today. They will oppose the Indian Premier League franchise team the Royal Challengers Bangalore at the Centurion ground from 11.30am.
The Ramnaresh Sarwan-led Guyana side dubbed the Amazon Conquerors have huge boots to fill following the performance of the only other regional side to compete at the tournament. Daren Ganga’s Trinidadians in an unprecedented and unexpected feat reached the final of last year’s tournament before losing to New South Wales of Australia.
This has left the Guyana side batting on a sticky wicket as there are huge expectations from a Caribbean public which has seen its representative team in its only previous competition keep winning and winning.
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Sarwan himself has added to the weight of expectations by stating that he wants the Amazon Conquerors to go one better than Trinidad.
“Trinidad & Tobago were the runners-up last time and we hope to go one better. They did so well last year when they weren’t expected to, and we beat them in the Caribbean T20, so that gives us lots of confidence. Their (T&T) performance is a motivating factor and we would like to go a step further than them, and my team is looking forward to the challenge,” he is quoted as saying on the Cricinfo website. Using Trinidad as a gauge the Guyana team should do well. They won the inaugural Stanford Twenty20 tournament beating none other than Trinidad in the final and also captured the inaugural West Indies Twenty20 tournament last month.
“It’s important that we should do the things we did that helped us to win the Caribbean competition,” Sarwan said. “We have lots of young, inexperienced players, but they are all very capable to springing surprises on the other teams,” said Sarwan.
The burden of doing better than Trinidad can have a two-fold effect; it can cause the players to raise the level of their games or cause the team to buckle under the pressure of the enormous expectations.
Like the Trinidad team did last year when they were nearly prevented from going because of a bitter dispute with the West Indies Players’ Association (WIPA) and the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board of Control, the Guyana team has endured a month of controversy ranging from a bitter squabble over money among WIPA , the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) and the Guyana Cricket Board (GCB) which involved a court injunction and also by the internal wrangling of the Guyana board which has resulted into somewhat of a stand off between the president Chetram Singh and his vice president Bissoondyal Singh. Then there is the minor issue of the name Amazon Conquerors which has come in for some criticism because there is a view that it is not totally reflective of this country’s culture and location.
There was also the issue of the non selection of former West Indies coach and Stanford Superstars assistant coach Roger Harper.
It seems is if there are so many negatives hovering over the team that it is doubtful whether the team is in the required frame of mind to compete against teams that have so much more going for them.
It is a situation that the players must strive to rise over and the best way is to ignore, blot out all the distracting issues of the past month and try and focus only on the upcoming matches. There must be thorough pre-match planning and analysis with varying options for the various situations that might arise and in this respect perhaps such a coach as Harper would have been vital in South Africa but that too, is past. The team had at least a one month encampment which Coach Ravindranauth Seeram has said he is satisfied with.
But a number of other teams were in South Africa early to play warm up matches which could only help their cause.
With the pitch conditions seeming to help the fast bowlers it is here that Guyana might find themselves wanting.
Their-spin based attack has reaped much success in the Caribbean where the pitches are low and slow but the South African pitches might have a bit more bounce.
Of vital importance will be the leadership of Sarwan. His task will be to set proper fields for the batsmen and urge his bowlers to try and bowl to those fields.
The group which includes the South Australia Redbacks, Highveld Lions and the Mumbai Indians, is not the “Group of Death” it seemed at first especially with the upset defeat of the star-studded Mumbai Indians by the Highveld Lions in the opening encounter.
To qualify for the semis though, will be tough. The bowlers will have to be disciplined and the batsmen innovative but not reckless.
If the Guyana team needs any motivation they should use the criticisms that they were subjected to shortly after winning the inaugural WICB Twenty20 tournament when they were pilloried by the Trinidad media in particular.
Thus the Amazon Conquerors need not look much further for motivation than to remember the words of their critics.
In that respect, the ultimate satisfaction apart from winning the tournament’s US$2.5m first prize would surely be to make the critics, and they know who they are, eat humble pie.
