ST JOHN'S–The West In­dies Crick­et Board Pro­fes­sion­al Crick­et League re­gion­al four-day tour­na­ment opens Fri­day with the fea­ture match bring­ing to­geth­er Trinidad & To­ba­go Red Force and Bar­ba­dos at Queen's Park Oval, Port of Spain.

The teams were last sea­son's top sides with Bar­ba­dos lift­ing the NAGI­CO Su­per50 ti­tle and fol­low­ing up with the Re­gion­al four-day crown, while T&T fin­ished in the run­ners-up spot in both com­pe­ti­tions.

It will be the 58th time the two sides will be meet­ing in the mod­ern first-class cham­pi­onship (1966 on­wards) � and 29th time T&T will play hosts.

Fol­low­ing are the views of head coach­es Hendy Springer of Bar­ba­dos and Gus Lo­gie of T&T.

GUS LO­GIE

On be­ing the run­ners-up last sea­son:

No doubt, we want to take it a step fur­ther and go all the way this time. We have spo­ken about the ob­jec­tive of win­ning the Re­gion­al 4-Day Tour­na­ment and the NAGI­CO Su­per 50 Tour­na­ment. We have a mix of youth and ex­pe­ri­ence, but we see the com­ing sea­son as a chal­lenge and to es­tab­lish our­selves as a force in the four-day for­mat in par­tic­u­lar � and this new sea­son and for­mat gives us the per­fect op­por­tu­ni­ty to do so.

On lack of con­sis­ten­cy in four-day com­pe­ti­tion:

Our bat­ting has not con­sis­tent­ly scored runs � par­tic­u­lar­ly the kind of big in­di­vid­ual scores and to­tals that put you in a po­si­tion to win four-day match­es. It's an area that we have tried to work very hard cor­rect­ing and so we are re­al­ly look­ing for­ward to the play­ers re­al­ly go­ing out and bat­ting for long pe­ri­ods and ac­cu­mu­lat­ing the big scores and to­tals that would al­low our bowlers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to put pres­sure on the op­po­si­tion.

On how does he plan to main­tain in­ten­si­ty through­out the long sea­son:

We have been train­ing for the last few months � three days a week, plus train­ing match­es on the week­ends. The play­ers are all keen to go there and do what they have learnt over the last few months. The en­thu­si­asm is there. We will have to work hard on fit­ness and sched­ule ap­pro­pri­ate pe­ri­ods of rest and re­lax­ation. We have some team build­ing ex­er­cis­es planned for when there is a down pe­ri­od and we will try to make sure that they are fresh for every match that comes along.

On play­ers to watch:

It's a long sea­son and op­por­tu­ni­ties will come for many of the play­ers, but we be­lieve Evin Lewis is one of the play­ers that we be­lieve has the po­ten­tial to go all the way and we would like to see his trans­for­ma­tion from the lim­it­ed-overs ver­sion to the longer ver­sion; Nicholas Pooran is not in the squad for this week­end's open­er, but he will be giv­en an op­por­tu­ni­ty lat­er on; Yan­nick Ot­t­ley has the abil­i­ty to es­tab­lish him­self as a de­cent all-round play­er; and Akeal Ho­sein was good last sea­son and we want to see his progress this com­ing sea­son.

HENDY SPRINGER

On play­ing to main­tain the top spot in the Re­gion­al 4-Day:

We do not on­ly want to re­main on top, but we al­so want to see these young men im­prove. It's all fine and dandy to win tro­phies, but I think the re­al achieve­ment will be to con­tin­ue win­ning tro­phies while see­ing im­prove­ment in the play­ers.

On how he plans to ap­proach stay­ing at the top:

It's a work al­ways in progress. In be­tween match­es, you al­ways have to be plan­ning and re­view­ing. You have to build-up to each match with train­ing ses­sions, and then it's down to plan­ning and ex­e­cu­tion for each op­po­nent. We have done it pret­ty well over the past cou­ple of sea­sons and we want to con­tin­ue do­ing the things that have worked for us and brought us suc­cess.

On how does he plan to main­tain in­ten­si­ty through­out the long sea­son:

It will be a chal­lenge to try and make every­thing that we do very in­ter­est­ing and en­joy­able. It's al­ready been a long year for many of the play­ers in our squad. They have been play­ing non-stop over the last six to eight months from the past re­gion­al sea­son in­to in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et and the Caribbean Pre­mier League for the Bar­ba­dos Tri­dents, as well as the A-Team and Cham­pi­ons League Twen­ty20 � and not for­get­ting that some of them have just fin­ished the club sea­son here. What­ev­er we do as a man­age­ment team must be in­ter­est­ing and en­joy­able, and em­pha­sise to the guys that they must main­tain a cer­tain lev­el of fit­ness. We have just one home match be­fore Christ­mas and many of the play­ers en­joy go­ing on the road and play­ing away from home, but we will have to hit the ground run­ning when we ar­rive in Trinidad. It's un­for­tu­nate that our prac­tice match­es were af­fect­ed by the rain, but we had some very, very in­tense train­ing ses­sions.

On play­ers he wants to see make a big leap in the com­ing sea­son:

I want to see Shai Hope, Shane Dowrich and Miguel Cum­mins be­come more con­sis­tent per­form­ers for us. Oth­ers like Kraigg Brath­waite, Kirk Ed­wards, Car­los Brath­waite, Ash­ley Nurse and Jonathan Carter have been part of ei­ther the West In­dies se­nior or A-Team squads, so we want to see them con­tin­ue push­ing their claims. This is a step­ping-stone to in­ter­na­tion­al crick­et and I am hop­ing that some of the play­ers in the team play well enough to be con­sid­ered for ho­n­ours above this lev­el. We have a few of our se­nior play­ers avail­able and so this will al­so help us in our first few match­es.