Prince confident Lancashire have what it takes.

Prince was bowled by Harry Gurney for 100
to end the match in Nottinghamshire's favour.

Lancashire’s South African run-scorer Ashwell Prince has faith in the squad and says the way they fought back shows what they will be about this season. 



Prince scored 100 on the final day of Lancashire’s clash with Nottinghamshire, where they were unfortunate to come off second best after his 147 run partnership with Tom Smith gave the Red Rose a chance of wining the game.

“In our chat this morning we were saying about being in a mindset of trying to score all the time rather than having a defensive mindset and just sitting back and obviously in our partnership we were trying to do that.

“It is obviously disappointing to lose the match but you try and take the positives out.  I thought as a team the way we fought back last night, with the ball to try and get those last wickets to give ourselves any chance of winning the match was great.

“Tom obviously was striking it sweetly and we know what he is capable of as a player and he came in and he was striking the ball nicely. We were able to rotate the strike and keep the scoreboard ticking.”

In a match dominated by the bowlers, Prince’s hundred was the highest score of the game, but he feels that conditions got progressively easier as the match developed and the final day provided useful conditions for his and Smith’s task.

“It is nice to get a score in the first match of the season. It is April and it is not easy to bat so it is nice to get a score in the early part of the season. Having said that today it was a good pitch for batting, we had a bit of sunshine yesterday and that flattened the pitch out nicely and it was a good pitch to bat on. 

“We realised as a team that the pitch was getting better and better and with the amount of overs we lost in the match it was only effectively a day three pitch.”

But when their resistance came to an end, the Nottinghamshire seamers resumed dominance and held their nerve to complete victory. 

“We had a really good chance of getting that score today, but we lost a few wickets after the partnership with Tom ended and that set us back a bit.” said Prince “When the new ball comes on you now there is always a chance of wickets and as a player your attitude needs to be that if I am going to get out then it needs to be a good ball and it was. 

“We had a few lower order guys coming in against the new ball so you expected the bowlers to do more damage. We did feel on top at one stage, even when Whitey [Wayne White] came in I thought we still had a chance because he is obviously capable.

“After Whitey got out we needed to start thinking about blocking it out or trying to hit a few boundaries and see if we can try and get close, but it was a good delivery to get Tom out and from there they became the favourites.” 

Prince commended the way Lancashire fought back on the third day with the ball and believed that the Lancashire bowlers gave them the opportunity to bat for the win on the final day.

“To give ourselves any chance of winning the match we knew we would need to bowl them out. If they were going to declare they would have been closer to 400 and that would have been much harder to get. 

“We knew that we needed to make something happen and our bowlers did exactly that and then today we also knew that if we had a few good partnerships then we could get the score.”