By Nick Creely
There is an insatiable hunger within Lachie Sperling and his Casey-South Melbourne team-mates ahead of the Victorian Premier Cricket season, which gets underway on 7 October against Ringwood.
The skipper – who saw his Swans bundled out of the 2016/17 finals race by eventual premiers Fitzroy-Doncaster in a semi-final – is itching to get on the park after a gruelling pre-season.
“It’s sort of crept up on us a little bit – the season starts in just over two weeks, but we simply can’t wait,” Sperling said.
“We know that we have to work even harder than last year to get back towards playing finals – the training standards have been really, really good.
“We’ve got plenty of games into our players now, so hopefully they just continue to develop for us going forward.
“It was exciting to play finals last year, but we start on zero points again now, so we want to get off to a good start.”
Under new coach Prabath Nissanka – a former Sri-Lankan international cricketer – and highly-credentialed specialist coaches Naveed Nawaz and Jayde Herrick – the Swans have kept things relatively simple, focusing on developing an already stable list.
“There hasn’t been a huge transition with Prabath, he already knows us and our game – there’s been no drastic change, but it’s been more of our senior players taking on leadership roles with our younger players,” Sperling said.
“Along with Naveed and Jayde, they’ve been really good too – Naveed’s messages are really clear, he doesn’t try to change too much, but he’s a really good person to talk to about technique and mindset.”
With a host of quick bowlers, such as spearheads Nathan Lambden and Brendan Rose, developing quicks Jackson Fry, Leigh Diston and Cameron Brown, as well as a strong contingent of batsmen such as Devin Pollock, Luke Manders, Sperling, Michael Wallace, Ryan Eaton, Jordan Wyatt and Dylan Hadfield, the Swans aren’t suffering from a lack of options.
“Our depth is really important to us; it makes blokes hungrier for runs and wickets – it’ll be pretty similar to last year with virtually the same group (for Round 1),” Sperling said.
“Our bowling’s a major strength of us, we want to continually improve and try new things – and then as a batting group, we want to look at getting blokes to 600 or 700 runs for the year.
“We’ve also got James Long, who has done a bit of stuff with the Vic Under 17s, and he’s a really exciting prospect – Ash Chandrasinghe is also looking really good at the moment and fingers crossed those two can have good seasons – they’ve got talent and are hungry to improve, there’s no point putting a ceiling on them but they’re young blokes.”
Entering his third season as Casey’s captain, Sperling – who showed glimpses of his immense talent with 449 runs last year – can’t wait to lead the side in an exciting period for the club.
“I’m enjoying the challenge, it’s really good fun, and I love leading the blokes we have as they’re all hungry and keen to do well,” he said.
“I just want to contribute – it’s the same with everyone I suppose, we just want to play in a winning side.”
