Ending up 36 points behind Division 1 champions High Wycombe, Banbury lost merely two league matches all season long and they could have finished higher if it wasn’t for weather disruptions. Banbury also came very close to winning the Oxfordshire T20 Final, narrowly losing by 15 runs to Oxford Downs at the start of September. “It was still a great season; we finished third,” Coyne told the Banbury Guardian.
“If you look back at all the young kids we’ve been able to get first-team cricket, as well as being able to finish third in a pretty competitive league, I would have snapped your hand off for that at the start of the year. “Obviously, like every team, we wanted to win the league. But two losses all year, you can’t really say too much. “I thought we played some really good cricket and the most pleasing thing was it wasn’t just one person standing up every week, it was multiple people and different people winning us games.” It was a huge year for the cricket club, not only because of the opening of the new balcony and terrace at the White Post Road clubhouse, but also the implementation of more youth in the team.
Coyne was determined to recruit more youngsters into the first XI setup and he succeeded with that approach, seeing several inexperienced players come on leaps and bounds. “It’s all the little things that you don’t see on the scorecard, like the energy they bring at training and on game day,” Coyne said of his youthful additions. “Ben Miller and Sam Hicks are the two that played most of the season, smiling ear-to-ear.
That is infectious on the older players who have been doing it a lot longer than they have! “It gives us a second wind with the younger players coming in.” On the defeat to Oxford Downs in the recent Oxfordshire T20 Final, Coyne added: “It was one of those… T20 cricket often comes down to one or two players. “It was a bit of an awful day in terms of weather. It was rainy, it was wet, it was cold, it was grey.
It was on and off for rain multiple times. “Again, there were quite a few young lads playing in there who played some really good cricket, but unfortunately in T20 it’s a very fine line and we came out on the wrong end.” There will now be several months off for the players, who will return to 2027 pre-season training in January of next year.
Source: www.banburyguardian.co.uk
