Vin­ode Mam­chan

Cap­tain of the los­ing T&T crick­et team De­nesh Ramdin says the past sea­son was a bit­ter one to swal­low with all the in­con­sis­tent per­for­mances.Speak­ing af­ter his team lost the fi­nals of the Re­gion­al First Class tour­na­ment to Bar­ba­dos by an in­nings and 22 runs yes­ter­day at Kens­ing­ton Oval, in Bar­ba­dos, Ramdin said: "It is a bit­ter sea­son to swal­low. We have some good per­for­mances but yet we had some poor ones and as well and you try to be con­sis­tent which we didn't achieve. We had a lot of chop­ping and chang­ing through­out the sea­son and this did not help as we lost play­ers at dif­fer­ent times.

"Hav­ing said that we need our play­ers to fo­cus on their game and try hard­er at what they do. The guys this sea­son have been try­ing to get all the runs in one ses­sion and it does not work like that. You need to bat two and a half ses­sions to score a hun­dred but our play­ers have been try­ing to do it in one ses­sion and in the process lose their wick­ets to care­less strokes."We need to go back to the draw­ing board and re-work our game if we want to be more suc­cess­ful in the fu­ture. In this game gone by, there were very few pos­i­tives but I must give praise to Lendl Sim­mons who scored a won­der­ful hun­dred. Al­so young Stephen Kat­wa­roo bat­ted well and Akeal Ho­sein looked the part."

Ramdin said the for­mat of do­mes­tic crick­et in Trinidad has noth­ing to do with the team's poor per­for­mances. "I don't think the for­mat has any­thing to do with the way our guys bat. They just have to build an in­nings and not rush it. They have to un­der­stand what is re­quired to be suc­cess­ful and start putting these things in­to prac­tice."Ramdin added that the toss proved cru­cial to the re­sult of the fi­nals."The toss was im­por­tant to win. We lost the toss and they sent us in to bat on a pitch with grass and mois­ture. They did not think we could have beat­en Ja­maica so they hasti­ly put to­geth­er a pitch here for the game. Kirk Ed­wards is say­ing that the toss had noth­ing to do with it but I can tell you that if we had won the toss, we would have shut them out for a low score."

Mean­while, suc­cess­ful Bar­ba­di­an skip­per Ed­wards said that the key to his team's suc­cess was their uni­ty. "When one man didn't get off an­oth­er man would put his hands up and this worked for us this sea­son. The uni­ty of the team was the key to our suc­cess. We stuck to­geth­er and stayed away from the me­dia and this helped us a lot."