Papua New Guinea's cricketers admit they would do things differently if they had the chance to tour the United Arab Emirates again.
The Barramundis lost the one day series 2-1 in Dubai, the four-day Intercontinental Cup match by nine wickets and were swept 3-0 in the Twenty20 internationals.
Photo: PNG Cricket
Head coach Dipak Patel said being on tour for a full month is new territory for the PNG squad and some things weren't handled well.
"Every time we tour with our guys it's a learning curve for us so we don't want to dwell on it too long," he said.
"We were a little bit ambushed by them. They produced wickets that obviously suited their bowlers: they were spinner-friendly, they only had one seamer and we were facing four or five spinners in any given time.
"So certainly we've learnt a few lessons there that we need to be a little bit more adapted to playing spin in all forms of the game and we learnt a lot about touring as well"
Coach Dipak Patel and Assistant Coach John Ovia Photo: PNG Cricket
Patel said losing the first one day international was hard to take as they felt they were right in the match but he was pleased at how they came back strong to level the series in the World Cricket League.
Despite losing their four-day Intercontinental Cup clash, Patel believed the team showed some encouraging signs.
"In the longer form of the game every time we play we seem to improve so I think the most telling factor was the performance of our batsmen," he said.
"We're starting to get a number of our top six scoring hundreds and that's what it's going to come down to is for us to be competitive in the longer form of the game we need more batsmen to score hundreds.
"Lega Siaka's hundred was outstanding. It's a shame that we didn't just have one or two more batsmen to create partnerships with him to perhaps put pressure on them in the last innings. [If they were] chasing probably 150-180 I think it would have been a very interesting game but it wasn't to be," said Patel.
"We seemed to take that into the T20 competition as well: our batsmen just didn't put partnerships and individuals didn't quite get the big scores that we needed to to put them under pressure because we felt that once we put them under pressure they didn't handle it as well as they thought they could."
Papua New Guinea's next assignment is not until the end of August, when they will play matches against Australia's six state teams.
Lega Siaka celebrates scoring his maiden first class century against the UAE. Photo: Cricket PNG
