Harper Sercombe
A winless campaign doesn’t tell the full story of Greenvale in this Victorian Premier Cricket season.
While on paper the Kangaroos season may have seemed like a failure, coaching director Ash Cavigan said the win-loss ratio wasn’t at the top of the club’s priorities this summer. With a new coaching group and playing list, it was all about development and getting everyone to settle in at the new-looking club.
“From where the club was at it was about establishing a new coaching group and lots of new players on the list,” he said.
“We had in excess of 35 new players at the club and incredibly young, lots of under 18s’ players.
“It was just about settling in a new coaching group, building the foundations and putting lots of energy and time into our young players.
“We were definitely happy with how our Dowling Shield (under 16) program went, we competed really well, won some games and we think we’ve identified a couple of good young players for the future. The same with our under 18s.
“They were our main areas of focus to try and get right and we’ve still got lots of work to do but we’re certainly pretty pleased with how that went.”
The other silver lining of the Kangaroos season were the young players that were able to experience first XI cricket for the first time, and perform to the standard when given the chance.
“Some young players and some recruits that we thought did really well in our first XI,” Cavigan said.
“Young Ivan Zmak finished with 16 wickets, for an 18-year-old playing his first full season of first XI cricket was a really good effort.
“Praveen Dilanka had a really strong year with the ball (23 wickets).”
Kangaroo’s skipper Justin Galeotti was also someone who impressed Cavigan throughout the year with his leadership and batting. Galeotti scored 436 runs at an average of 29.07 opening the batting this season.
Moving forward, Cavigan said the young core is there, now it’s about recruiting and adding ready made first XI players.
“We’ve got a solid group of players and a good group that we can move forward with and build on,” he said.
“We’ll be pretty aggressive in the off season and we’re in a position where we think we can offer good first XI players a stable, happy place to play cricket. Great facilities and to be a part of a young group that can only go one way which is up.”
While Cavigan admits it’s still a working progress, he said he doesn’t believe being able to compete with most teams is too far off.
He said the last month of cricket played by the first XI was promising and shows the improvement that has already been made.
“We think if we recruit well and keep doing what we’re doing then we can jump into the middle of the table,” he said.
“Then from there, we’ve just got to keep improving and hope we can keep pushing up and get into a position to be a top four contender. But that’s a bit off for us yet.
“First things first, recruit well this year, not just to strengthen our first XI team but to give our young players good quality players to train around and be around.”
