October 13, 2020 (232News)
FREETOWN – After being stopped from training as a team due to the COVID19 outbreak for some months, the Sierra Leone national U-19 Cricket team returned to effective training few days ago. The youth team was preparing to take part in the ICC U-19 World Cup qualifying tournament this year when the Coronavirus outbreak hit Sierra Leone. The virus outbreak gave cause to let the Sports Minister ban all sports activities in the country. Few days ago the Minister lifted the ban allowing all national teams preparing to take part in pending international competitions to start training. The U-19 team started training a week ago with 24 players for the ICC U-19 World Cup qualifying early next year. Having being inactive for months without training, the U-19 assistant coach Gabriel Anthony assessed the fitness of the players as 60-70% physically fit. He went on that despite the ban, the players were engaged in self-training which maintained their fitness.
On the general attributes of the team, Gabriel said the team has three coaches who played in several international competitions with vast experience added to their coaching knowledge. He went on that presently they are working on the batting and bowling skills of the players as well as on fielding and how to set fielding for opponent batsmen. Gabriel said the advantage is that most of the players are not new to international completion. He though accepted that most of them may have lost form due to the long interval but hurried to say that they are fast in responding to the training skills.
