Guyana Jaguars head coach Esaun Crandon said he did not expect less from the quartet of Captain Leon Johnson, Veerasammy Permaul, Devendra Bishoo and Raymon Reifer who topped their physical training assessment at the Georgetown Cricket Club (GCC) ground on Monday.
The near three-hour long session, which was conducted under the guidance of Crandon, Chairman of National Cricket Selectors Rayon Griffith (who is also the assistant coach) and other members of the technical training team, went through the process with the players who were unavailable at the beginning of the camp.
Bishoo was in Sri Lanka representing the West Indies ‘A’ team while Johnson was representing the West Indies senior team. Permaul, who was ill and Reifer, who was still in Barbados before relocating to Guyana last week, all recorded high marks and excelled in various areas of the session.
Ensuring that all contracted players undergo the mandatory tests, the fours participated in the beep test, which according the Crandon, yielded results over 11 while the players successfully endured the various cardiovascular and core routines which were conducted.
“Everyone did well overall. It was satisfying for me because the guys who were involved were known to be fit so it’s good to see that they brought the momentum to the training,” said Crandon.
Speaking of any last minute fine-tuning which needs to be done the former Guyana all-rounder indicated that fielding is an area of concern at the moment and they are working diligently on rectifying it.
“Well, like everything, we keep stressing on players to improve in all the areas. We are working in the fielding department because we dropped a few catches in the practice match so we will be looking to improve on that,” said Crandon.
He added: “We are still looking for a better start from our openers. We need people to start scoring hundreds. The team has experienced players such as (shiv) Chanderpaul, Narsingh (Deonarine), (Assad) Fudadin and (Leon) Johnson but we don’t want to pressure them we need the younger players like (Rajendra) Chandrika, (Trevon) Griffith, (Vishaul) Singh and others to step up.”
Speaking on the bowling department, Crandon said that the slower bowlers will be depended on heavily especially for the three home games while adding that awareness and knowing ones role in the team and playing that role is a key component for success.
The Jaguars will now wrap up their camp with two training sessions, one today at 13:00hrs and the final one tomorrow at 9:00hrs both at the National Stadium.
