Sport: Fiji U19s to make Cricket World Cup debut

Transcript

The Fiji Under 19 cricketers will make their World Cup debut later today against England in Bangladesh.

Zimbabwe and the West Indies also await in the pool stage.

Head coach Shane Jurgensen told Vinnie Wylie he's expecting a mixture of nerves and excitement once they take the field in Chittagong.

SHANE JURGENSEN: Last night at our team meeting and they seemed to be quite relaxed actually. No doubt this morning they will wake up and it will hit them pretty quick - the last 12 months of preparing and planning, it's all about to arrive and we're into it today in the first game. So far we had a good final warm-up game against Scotland - got a lot of confidence [out of it]. We really should have won the game in all seriousness.

VINNIE WYLIE: For pretty much all of your squad this is the biggest game they've played in their lives, is it?

SJ: Oh easily [laughing], easily against a very formidable cricket nation in England. It's just a great opportunity for the guys. We felt that the last training session yesterday went quite well. If we get it right you just never know but [I'm putting] no expectations on the boys, just go out there and we just ask them to do their best. Our biggest battle is making sure that we keep our focus for 100 overs and play that whole game, and there's where we came a bit undone a little bit at times in Australia, in the five games we played there and two warm-up games here. We played well 60-80 overs out of 100 and then we just lost our focus and that's due to probably our inexperience of playing cricket and not playing a lot of 50 over cricket.

VW: You've got a lot of local knowledge of Bangladesh, having coaches there for a few years and you were up there before Christmas as well with the T20 league. How has that knowledge helped you in your preparations?

SJ: [It's] certainly made life a lot easier off the field, in terms of making we've got a lot of things around to support the players in place. In terms of stuff on the field pitches in Bangladesh tend to be slow, obviously on the low side. The big thing here is that the wickets can be inconsistent so you can actually get a lot of variation actually out of the pitch itself. We're not quite as quick some of our bowlers as some of the other guys here so we need to make we utilise the variation from the pitch. What we're probably missing is a fair-dinkum sort of spinner however we've made plans around our seamers and set some fields that we can try and restrict the opposition. Then with the batting we've just got to make sure you really watch the ball and play straight and continue to play straight and give yourself time at the crease and get used to the conditions. We've got to bat the 50 overs: it's a common thing to say but it's easier said than done.

VW: A lot has been made of the security situation in Bangladesh. Australia opted not to travel there. A lot of arrangements have been put in place by the ICC for all the teams - now that you're on the ground how is everyone feeling, is it all in order?

SJ: Yeah everything's going quite well so far. The only battle that we had with the two warm-up games was making sure we got to the ground. There was always a couple of issues with our bus, a couple of other teams had issues with the buses and more so the travel...took us nearly two hours to get back. Everything else so far has been fantastic...there's been no issues and everyone feels safe I'm sure.

VW: Finally, what are the expectations on the team for this tournament?

SJ: One, I just want to make sure that we play really well ourselves and give ourselves every chance. If we did that anything can really happen - there's no doubt it will be very tough. As long as we're very competitive and also entertaining...then let's see what happens.