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John Bracewell Review Of The Season Part Two

10 November 2014

John Bracewell is confident of another strong tilt at the Royal London One-Day Cup next season after reaching the quarter-finals against the odds this summer.

Gloucestershire’s Director of Cricket believes the loss of James Fuller for the entire competition because of foot injury and then seeing Michael Klinger ruled out of the quarter-final against Kent at Canterbury by a broken arm were massive blows.

But the team still put themselves in a great position to reach the semi-finals before a disappointing middle-order batting collapse against Kent at Canterbury and John saw enough from four group wins to suggest there will be more successes to come in 2015.

He told this website:  “I said at the beginning that I thought it would be our competition and I felt we did remarkably well to reach the knock-out stage with an under-resourced group.

“I was really hoping we would have James Fuller fit to play 50-over cricket because of his short game skills.  As it turned out we were not only without him, but also Michael Klinger for the quarter-final because of his broken arm.

“Our senior batsmen faltered in that match, but our younger bowlers really stood up for the entire competition, enabling us to bowl opponents out.

“That included the almost irrepressible Yorkshire batting line-up at Headingley.  We really put them to the sword to set up a great win.

“I was incredibly impressed by our fielding in the format.  I feared it might be a weakness so that was particularly encouraging and as a whole there was a big tick for our 50-over cricket.”

John admitted that Gloucestershire failed to ram home their advantage, having batted positively to set up a great victory opportunity in the quarter-final.

He said:  “The disappointment was that we got ourselves into a winning position and our three senior batsmen failed.

“We started really well with Chris Dent and Will Tavare, chasing a gettable total having talked about what was needed to make runs on that particular wicket.

“It wasn’t a great pitch, but we got ourselves ahead of the game. Then for some reason our most experienced batsmen were not able to carry out the plan and we got behind the eight ball.

“When the pressure is on in a big game you need your senior players to come to the fore.  I am not putting all the blame on them, but Ian Cockbain, Alex Gidman and Hamish Marshall all failed over a very short period of time and it changed the game.

“I feel we have a tougher group and schedule for next season’s competition and we are going to have to manage our squad to avoid too much stress and fatigue.

“But we have the bowling attack to make us very competitive again and it just needs our batsmen to step up to the plate for us to have a great chance of reaching the knock-out stage again and hopefully progressing further from there.”

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