Losing two players just days before a tournament is scheduled to start is never ideal, but Arnold Manders can still see an upside.

As expected Malachi Jones and Fiqre Crockwell have been dropped from the Bermuda squad that will travel to Indianapolis on Friday for the ICC Americas Division One Twenty20 tournament.

The pair have been replaced by Jason Anderson and Jacobi Robinson, and Manders, the Bermuda head coach, said he had tried to keep the upheaval within the squad to a minimum.

“It’s like we tell the players, you just control the things you can have control over,” Manders said. “It’s out of our hands, we’ve just got to deal with it any way we can.

“You can’t control the rain, you can’t control the way the wicket is playing, you can’t control the umpires, just what you have control over, and when you let it get to you, then it destroys your game.”

Crockwell’s withdrawal was not entirely unexpected given his well-documented legal issues, and Manders said that Anderson, who is also a wicketkeeper-batsman and will provide back-up for Christian Burgess, was a “logical replacement”.

The loss of Jones, who failed a late fitness test on a calf injury, is not as damaging as it might have been in recent years. Stefan Kelly has returned to the side after several years away, and he will be one of three pace bowlers that Manders has available, with Justin Pitcher and Jordan DeSilva also in the squad.

“Obviously we would have liked to have had him [Jones] on board, but with Stefan coming in, he can fill the void,” Manders said. “It would have been even better if we had Malachi, but those things are out of our hands.”

Robinson’s inclusion also goes some way to solving a hole that Manders had at the bottom of the order, with the lack of an explosive batsman evident during the training camp in Jamaica.

While Bermuda won all three games they played, they struggled to score runs in the closing stages despite having wickets in hand.

“Jacobi gives us that explosiveness at the end,” Manders said. “We lost in one area, but we gained something else in an area we were weak in.”

That game plan is likely to entail Dion Stovell and James Celestine opening the batting, and Manders said that he thought the pair were capable of giving his side “some pretty good starts”.

Bermuda will need them because their first two games of the round-robin event, which runs from May 3 to 9, are against the United States and Canada. They then face Suriname on May 5.

Bermuda will play their opponents twice over the course of the week and must finish in the top two to reach the World Twenty20 Qualifiers in Ireland in July.