Bears Around the World – Paul Farbrace at the Abu Dhabi T10

The Abu Dhabi 10 is underway and there is a big Bears involvement with Bears director of cricket Paul Farbrace head coach of Team Abu Dhabi and players Danny Briggs and Chris Benjamin in his squad. Here is Farby's first blog for the Bears fans from the tournament.

Hello from Abu Dhabi to all the Bears fans. I hope you are all keeping safe and well and being warmed into the winter months by memories of the fantastic cricket played by Will Rhodes and his team last season.

Myself, Danny Briggs and Chris Benjamin are out here for the Abu Dhabi 10 and we are very excited to get going. Our first game is against Bangla Tigers tonight. Personally, I can’t wait for the tournament to start. Last year I was due to coach Bangla Tigers but the quarantine rules changed which meant I didn’t come in the end. That was frustrating but it’s great to be here now – it is the first franchise tournament I have been involved.

We played a practice game against Delhi Bulls on Wednesday night and that was really interesting. It is a brutal format. Last night our opening bowler got hit for five fours in the first over. It is a brutal game with so many top-quality players on all sides and a lot of power hitting. Briggsy bowled a good over and went for 20!  One ball he didn’t get quite right but the rest were decent deliveries but he went for one dot ball, two singles and three sixes. As a bowler, your margin for error is almost non-existent. As a batter, you are trying to hit almost every ball for four or six.

Briggsy is a superb bowler who is as well-equipped as anyone in the world to deal with that pressure and this will be great experience for Chris too. He played last night and it is going to be fantastic for a young guy like him to be in the dressing room and practice with the likes of Chris Gayle, Liam Livingstone who join us for the first game tomorrow.

We’ve also got Fidel Edwards, who played for us at Warwickshire, Colin Ingram, Naveen-ul-Haq and some other really good players. We have a great multi-cultural group with players from England, South Africa, Pakistan, West Indies, Afghanistan and the UAE.

Then you look around the other set-ups here and see all the top-class players and coaches from around the world. One of the great things about franchise cricket is there is so much learning to be done from how other teams play. We have Lance Klusener as one of our coaches and also out here coaching are people like Dougie Brown, Mushtaq Mohammed, Stuart Law, Kevin O’Brien, Paul Nixon and Ian Bell. There are people from all over the world of cricket to enjoy being around and learn from and it’s a pleasure and privilege to be part of it.

FARBY