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'I'm the team's best fielder' jokes Romaine

Bermuda's cricketers are spending much of this next week with English fielding coach Julian Fountain, who is teaching them a new throwing technique.

Irving Romaine fancies himself as something of a fielding specialist. After one throw, he threw his hat into the air and charged around screaming "that's championship quality, this is Romaine's domain, you guys can't come close."

Belief in his own skill was further enhanced when one of Shannon Rayner's attempts sailed high and wide of its intended target.

Another successful Romaine completion led him to declare that the rest of the group were just throwing for second place.

His constant banter eventually got to Rayner who told him to 'shut up'. But Romaine's clowning around highlights something about the Bermuda squad this week.

There is an atmosphere of enjoyment, coupled with hard work. Everyone is very focused, something perfectly highlighted by that fact that every single player was up at 7a.m. without fail, ready to start their day.

* * * *

Bermuda took 55 minutes to get to their opening game on Sunday – journey they had been told should take 20 minutes.

It might have been different had their driver known where they were going, but he didn't, he just had a general idea as to the location.

Several wrong turns later, and an increasingly irritated head coach later, it became a case of if, and not when they would arrive at Sinoville Cricket Club.

However, arrive they duly did, and with the team bus making several journeys to and from their High Performance Centre base over the course of the day, ferrying back water and lunch, among other things, there was reason to believe the return journey would be as quick as promised.

This, however, is Africa, and despite repeated assurances from the driver that it would take 20 minutes to get back, the actually journey time was closer to 40 minutes.

Not that, that would usually matter, but the game took longer than expected and in the end the team arrived back at their base with barely enough time to eat their evening meal.

The lesson in all of this, of course, is to never believe a time given to you in South Africa. Time is more of a concept than something to live by.

It's the reason it takes a taxi 30 minutes to arrive when the driver says he's 'just around the corner', and the reason why the buses never run on time.

* * * *

Strange as it may seem, there are parts of South Africa where you would be hard pressed to know the World Cup was little more than two months away.

In the Hatfield suburb where Bermuda are based, for example, aside from a couple of posters at bus stops and the obligatory cheap merchandise at the petrol station, the marketing campaign appears non-existent.

There are two main reasons for this. Firstly, Hatfield is a rugby-oriented area where the World Cup seems to be viewed as nothing more than a mild irritant, and secondly, the country is a building site, where scaffolding, brick dust, and in some cases the smell of fresh paint are all far more prevalent than advertising encouraging locals to get behind Bafana, Bafana.

Mind you, South African authorities will have more pressing concerns, like how to deal with the hundreds of thousands of people that are sure to descend on the country.

As mentioned above, the public transport system is practically non-existent, unless of course you're going a long distance by coach, in which case, bizarrely, it's quite good.

Taxis range from unreliable to be being rust-ridden death traps that probably shouldn't be on the road in the first place.

There is, allegedly, a plan to have shuttle buses working, but they appear destined to suffer from the same time-problems that plague the nation.

Either way, if you're heading to South Africa for the World Cup make sure you leave enough time to get wherever you're planning on going – like maybe a day or so.