Dolphins look to young players to defeat Knights

The Dolphins’ focus for the remaining three 4-Day Domestic Series games of the season is still on winning each match and also backing their young players to perform ahead of facing the VKB Knights in Pietermaritzburg from Monday, coach Grant Morgan said.

The KwaZulu-Natal franchise saw their outside hopes of challenging for the title fade away completely when they were beaten heavily by the bizhub Highveld Lions in the last game.

The result left them bottom of the table on 71.72 points, remarkably almost half the tally of log-leaders the World Sports Betting Cape Cobras (140.04).

Now they must regroup and try to improve at the City Oval against a visiting side that held the leaders to a draw in their previous game.

The central franchise have a new coach in Alan Kruger and Morgan believes this has buoyed them, warning that his Dolphins will have to be on their toes for the round eight clash.

“Always when there’s a new coach you see some change,” he said.

“You’ll see a resilience factor, a lot of those guys, they’re good players, so we’re expecting a tough contest.” As for his own side, Morgan said he wanted to see further improvement from the last game where they were made to follow on against the Lions.

He also revealed that they were looking towards giving opportunities to new faces to stake a claim in the first-class setup.

“We’ve already started to look towards the future and, as you see, we’re starting to give a lot of the younger players a chance,” Morgan said.

“I think if you look from the fifth game onwards, players like [Grant] Roelofsen have had opportunities.

“Names like [Keith] Dudgeon, [Ethan] Bosch and [Sibonelo] Makhanya are coming into the mix and you’re seeing less of the older players like [Robbie] Frylinck, who hasn’t retired, but we’re looking at breeding younger players now.

“The average age of our side for that last game was probably around 24 – quite exciting.”

Knights coach Kruger has, meanwhile, predicted a tough battle for his team in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands.

“We had a good performance against the Cobras and we’re just looking to continue in that positive way,” he said.