Coach Butler pleased with his charges

Deighton Butler, triumphant coach of the St Vincent and the Grenadines senior men’s cricket team,{{more}} which lifted the 2012 Winlott Windward Islands T-20 title, has expressed delight in the performance of his charges.

In an interview with SEARCHLIGHT last Monday morning at the E.T. Joshua airport, following the team’s return from St Lucia, a pleased Butler said, “I feel happy for what we have achieved as a team… I am more happy for the guys because they have been working hard and I was really more or less facilitating the guys … it’s not just about me; we were a unit.”

St Vincent and the Grenadines played unbeaten in the tournament, winning their three preliminary matches and the finals last Sunday night, by 22 runs, against Dominica, at the Beausejour Cricket Stadium.

It was St Vincent and the Grenadines’ first lien on the tournament, which was inaugurated in 2010.

In commenting on the team’s success, Butler said, “We had a really good preparation; we did a lot of game sense scenarios which put us in situations that we will be in actual games, so when we get to the tournament some of the situations we found ourselves in, the guys could have related to them because they were things we had been working on.”

Continuing, Butler added: “We had a good team spirit, a good unit; we didn’t depend on any one person; we had a lot of depth both in batting and bowling, so it gave us a lot of options.”In assessing the championship match, Butler recalled, “When we got over 90 runs, we knew we could have defended that score, because all of our bowlers have been performing well over the tournament and the self belief and the planning that we all had as a team, we knew that we were going to pull it off… never at one time doubted our-selves.”

Butler, who was part of the St Vincent and the Grenadines team in the inaugural tournament, said his experience worked to make his task easier.

“Playing in tournament 2010, I saw what we didn’t have why we lost the tournament and when those guys played in Dominica last year, I listened to some of the things that went wrong. So, in practice, we to tried to rectify some of those problems and we were able to buck up in those weaker areas,” Butler concluded.

Butler’s sentiments were shared by manager of the team Elvis Browne, who has been in the position for the past six years.

Browne has seen the team lift four titles.

The manager was high in praise of Butler for his astute planning of the strategies. (RT)