“The surface fooled us a little bit” – Klusener

On the heels of a crushing, three-wicket loss to the Trinbago Knight Riders on Sunday night in the 2025 Republic Bank Caribbean Premier League (CPL) final, Guyana Amazon Warriors (GAW) Head Coach Lance Klusener was the figure to perform the post-mortem on yet another final loss for the franchise.
Klusener, in his assessment, conceded that his team were a few runs short in setting a target.

“I think 20- 25 runs short. I think we left some runs out there, but you know, I thought that was always going to be difficult for us to defend, but yeah, a lot happening in the wicket and there was always half a chance. I think, just being something that’s troubled us much the whole competition is that we’ve relied a lot on one or two batsmen, but we’ve been short of runs, pretty much, most of the competition. It catches up to you in big games,” the GAW Head Coach admitted.

Quizzed about the now trending decision to bat first in Sunday night’s final, Klusener justified the decision while sharing that the pitch might have fooled them.
He explained, “It looked like a good surface actually, it really did and probably fooled us a little bit, but in saying that, there was a lot of spin happening towards the end and I think another 20 runs, if we’d just applied ourselves a little bit better, we would’ve been fine, you know.
“So, I don’t think there was any problem with that and then quite a lot of dew again this evening. It has been sprayed and the other night there was no dew and tonight, it was there again. A lot of ifs and buts, still a solid decision to bat first in a final. Runs on the board always comes with its different pressures to chase that, as we saw tonight,” Klusener further stated.
The South African international turned Coach went on to respond to inquiries regarding Shamar Joseph’s late introduction into the bowling attack.
“The ball was spinning, so I think that’s our strength as well with [Gudakesh] Motie and [Imran] Tahir. So, if they could just get us a breakthrough, you know, Shamar could follow that with a little bit of pressure,” he noted.
Though not being a part of the Amazon Warriors’ heartbreaking finals saga from the start, Klusener still had kind words for the thousands of fans who showed up in support of the team on Sunday night.
The GAW Head Coach expressed, “Awesome. Thanks very much for turning up. We didn’t play as well as we would’ve like, but we also probably wouldn’t have been in the final if it wasn’t for the 12th-man support that we get here at Providence.”
Though the Amazon Warriors missed out on the big cup, there were still some individual prizes to go around. Shai Hope was the highest run-scorer of the tournament with 491 runs while Captain Tahir was the highest wicket-taker with 23 scalps. Quentin Sampson grabbed the Breakout Player award while Motie was deemed to have the best celebration following his ‘cutthroat’ celebration in Qualifier 1 of the play-offs.