“Two games of cricket at Lord’s on Thursday and really competitive fixtures all weekend against Scotland ‘A’ have been the perfect start to the season,” MacRae told BBC Radio Jersey.<\/p>\n
“We’re tailoring everything towards Cyprus in May, and we’ve faced stiff opposition already – the MCC had a good side on Thursday at Lord’s.<\/p>\n
“Scotland ‘A’ have taken a strong side down; the two games yesterday were fought closely. Today we’ve won the first one in a brilliant finish with Zak Tribe at the crease hitting two sixes in the final over. <\/p>\n
“He’s bowled well this weekend, and with the bat yesterday and today he’s started to show his striking potential, and that partnership with Julius Sumerauer this morning was absolutely outstanding.<\/p>\n
“We’ve also seen some dynamic starts from Harrison Carlyon, so really good signs.”<\/p>\n
Jersey have been drawn in a group with hosts Cyprus, France, Croatia and Switzerland in the T20 World Cup Europe Sub-regional Qualifier A next month.<\/p>\n
Should they top their pool, they will play the winners of the other five-team group, which includes Channel Island rivals Guernsey, for a place in the final round of European qualifying next year.<\/p>\n
Jersey came third at that stage last summer, missing out on a place at this year’s T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka on net run rate as hosts the Netherlands and Italy qualified.<\/p>\n
“The squad are really ambitious to go to the World Cup,” added MacRae, who has returned to lead the island side this year.<\/p>\n
“First of all, we need to deal with this Cyprus tournament; it’s a tough format, there are some good teams, and it’s on a mat in Cyprus, so it’s a venue we haven’t been to before.<\/p>\n
“We’re really excited about the potential of this T20 side, but first of all we just need to focus on the Cyprus tournament and play our best cricket.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Two games of cricket at Lord’s on Thursday and really competitive fixtures all weekend against Scotland ‘A’ have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540830,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-540829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540829"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540829\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}