Head Coach of the West Indies under-19 squad for the International Cricket Council’s Under-19 World Cup, Floyd Reifer, says Guyanese Isai Thorne and Matthew Nandu have improved adding that he is comfortable with the team ahead of the tournament.
Reifer said Nandu and Thorne have shown improvements over the last month when they were training in Barbados.
“I am fairly comfortable, it would be nice to have some more facetime with the lads leading into the World Cup but we are comfortable with where we are at now,” he declared.
“We just need to get in some actual cricket games with the squad,” he added while appearing as a guest on the Mason and Guest radio programme.
“I can say Matthew and Isai are improved cricketers… obviously Thorne bowls pretty quick for his age, he just turned 17 years and bowls around 83 miles per hour and I think these boys have a good future in cricket,” he opined.
Speaking about the left-handed top order batsman, Nandu, who also bowls off-spin, Reifer remembers his father, Arjune Nandu, who played for West Indies under-19 as a potent leg-spinner.
“Nandu is a very good cricketer, he resides in Canada. He is a hard worker, he came to Barbados and spent some time with us and over that four-week period, we could see his game improving a lot so over the past few months the programme we had in place for both Nandu and Thorne along with all the other players, we have
seen development, we have seen progression in terms of how the players operate on and off the field,” Reifer acknowledged. The head coach said that there are no concerns at the moment just a matter of getting some more matches for the squad in order to identify roles and responsibilities while seeing the players play under pressure. He admitted that it was a tough task to pick the final 15-man squad owing to the magnitude of talents in the region but detailed those who were selected put in a lot of work physically, mentally and skillfully. He pointed out that it is a very important five-match series coming up against South Africa prior to the World Cup which is booked for January in the Caribbean.
