Cap­tain of the Red Steel Dwayne Bra­vo was hard on his men af­ter their four-wick­et loss to Bar­ba­dos Tri­dents in their Li­ma­col Caribbean Pre­mier League T20 clash at Kens­ing­ton Oval in Bar­ba­dos on Sat­ur­day night.

The Red Steel bat­ting first on win­ning the toss crashed to 52 all out and al­though pac­er Fi­del Ed­wards grabbed 5/22 to trou­ble the home team, they reached their tar­get of 53 for six af­ter eight overs to claim the points.

Bra­va speak­ing on the sec­ond suc­ces­sive de­feat for his side said :"We are em­bar­rass­ing our fans out there and I feel for them. We are tak­ing too long to un­der­stand what is re­quired to win match­es and our play­ers have to think deep and hard and come out of this."

With the pitch of­fer­ing gen­er­ous bounce and turn Bangladeshi Shak­ib Al Hasan grabbed a world record of six wick­ets for six runs to rout the Red Steel. Ac­cord­ing to Bra­vo the bats­men need­ed to ap­ply them­selves bet­ter to the task.

"We had in­for­ma­tion com­ing from the mid­dle all the time and those who went out there should have un­der­stood what the pitch was of­fer­ing and play ac­cord­ing­ly. Had we bat­ted out the overs, who knows what could have been the end re­sult."

Look­ing ahead to the next three games will be in Trinidad and To­ba­go, the skip­per said :"We know that so far we have let down the fans but we are look­ing for­ward to them show­ing up at the Oval and sup­port­ing us. All the away teams have lost so far in the tour­na­ment, so it is im­por­tant that we win the games at home so that we can stand a good chance of mak­ing the play-offs.

"The pitch at the Oval is ex­pect­ed to be bet­ter for T20 crick­et than the one here and hope­ful­ly our bat­ters can put their heads down and come to the par­ty. In this game we sort­ed out the prob­lem of the slow start that we had in the first game but then the mid­dle fell apart. We have a good team but I need the play­ers to take re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for what has tran­spired so far and show their hands. They need to fight hard for this team to come back from the two de­feats and we are look­ing for­ward to much im­prove­ment."

The team flew in­to T&T at 10am yes­ter­day morn­ing and will have a bat­ting ses­sion on­ly at the Queen's Park Oval this evening af­ter set­tling at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain. To­day, they are ex­pect­ed to have an­oth­er two ses­sions and this will be fol­lowed by a fi­nal in­tense prac­tice ses­sion to­mor­row.

Bra­vo end­ed by say­ing: "We want to keep a re­laxed at­mos­phere in the team but at the same time we want to show that in­ten­si­ty that would win us games. We have a very good op­por­tu­ni­ty play­ing in front of our own fans over the next three games and we are look­ing for­ward to it." (VM)

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