Prince won’t settle for second best
FIRWOOD BOOTLE skipper Craig Prince hopes the signing of Sam Kershaw from Rainhill will help his side win their first Liverpool Gin Liverpool & District Cricket Competition title since 2009.
The Wadham Road team finished as runners-up to Ormskirk this year but that is their best placing since they won the crown eight years ago and Prince is under no illusions that the second spot is satisfactory.
“We have to catch up with Ormskirk,” he said.
“Runners-up isn’t good enough for us but we are trying to put that right.
“It’s eight seasons since we last won the title and people are mentioning it to us.
“However, we are trying to knock one of the best club teams in the country off their perch.”
To help him achieve his goal, Prince has recruited Kershaw, who scored 575 runs in 2016 and 688 in the season just ended.
“I think Sam’s a very good player and he will be a replacement for our Australian batsman, Jakson Knight, who’s not coming back next year,” said Prince.
“He’s young, he wants to do well in the game and he’s looking to get himself a county in due course. We’ve helped Danny Davies play for Northamptonshire’s second team this season and we’ll try and do something similar for Sam.
“He’ll bat up the order for us but first he’s going to spend the winter in Australia and we hope he’ll benefit from that.
“He fits our job description which is that he’s young and talented.”
“We got run ragged in the field on one or two occasions last year because we do have a few people who are the other side of 30.
“We recognise that we need to sharpen up in the field.”
An improvement in Bootle’s fielding would also help them in knockout competitions, an area in which they also fell short in 2017.
Defeats in the national and Lancashire knockout were par- ticularly bruising but Prince’s team will get a chance to bag a trophy early next season when the postponed semi-final and final of this season’s Ray Digman Trophy will take place.
“We’ll have to try and win that trophy twice in the same season,” said Prince.
“Of course we’ll give it a good go in all competitions but we have to accept that we came up short this year.”