Greenvale’s woes in the Victorian Premier Cricket season have continued as the Kangaroos lost to Footscray on Saturday.
Greenvale struggled early after winning the toss and bowling as Footscray’s openers piled on a 220 run opening stand with both openers reaching 100.
After the start they had, Footscray was able to go on to make 5-297 at the conclusion of the 50 overs.
The total was far too big for the Kangaroos to chase down as they could only reach 154, from their 50 overs, with a wicket on the last ball of the innings seeing them all-out as well.
“We’re probably a bit disappointed in how we’re playing at the moment,” Kangaroos’ director of coaching Ash Cavigan said.
“We’re certainly hoping for much more competitive results. We’re having a good look at our white ball cricket at the moment, because it hasn’t really got to the level that we’d hoped it would.
“So there’s a bit for us to work on and there’s a bit for us to review and have a really good look at everything, from our planning and training to make sure that come gameday what we want to do shows up.
“We’re not even executing the basics at the moment. Even the simplest things like batting out the overs and it’s through all our teams. We always knew that the first XI were going to struggle to compete just due to where we were at the start of the season.
“I think for us an area of focus is to just simplify things, get the basics right, training those basics as well as we can and then hopefully that shows up on gameday.”
Kavigan said the batting side of the game, particularly in white-ball cricket, is what concerns him the most. Yet, there was one positive to come out of Saturday, with Jordan Kosteas and Bernard Kelly putting on a 61 run partnership to show something for the Kangaroos’ innings.
“BK especially is a really important person in our club in terms of character, he’s that older guy that has some experience, he’s extremely loyal, and he’s having a great year so that’s been a real positive,” Cavigan said.
“Jordy is a young guy who we think can be a really good player. We started him off, he struggled a bit, we went back, worked on a few things and he’s back now and looks a different player.
“That’s what we wanted to do this year was identify some of those guys and get as much quality game experience into them as we could, but with that comes a balance of not dropping them into the fire so to speak.
“A lot of our guys are probably playing above where you’d like to play them at the moment in terms of development. We’d love to hold a few guys back and let them make 600, 700 runs in the twos. We’d love to do that, we’re just not in a position to do it.”
The Kangaroos are set to play Melbourne University on Saturday for the first two-day clash of 2024.
