Sport

Robert Bailey, Gleaner Writer

England's captain, Karen Atkinson, is aiming for a sweep of Jamaica's Sunshine Girls in their National Commercial Bank (NCB) two-Test Sunshine Series, which begins at the National Indoor Sports Centre on Wednesday.

"We are taking this series extremely serious because we are hoping to take a 2-0 series win," said Atkinson in an interview with The Gleaner on Friday, shortly after her team's arrival at the Norman Manley International Airport.

"However, I am sure that is what Jamaica is hoping for as well and so it should be a great battle," said Atkinson, whose number three-ranked team is rated one place above Jamaica. The second match in the series will be played next Friday at the same venue.

"Every time we come here it is really tough and we always have a great game against Jamaica, but we are here to win and this is our main aim," she said.

Atkinson added that they haven't played in an international series since February, and so they would be using the series to try out a lot of different combinations ahead of the Commonwealth Games, which will be held in Delhi, India in October.

"We have a few youngsters who have never played in Jamaica before and we also have quite a lot of experienced players, who have played in a number of Commonwealth and World Championships Games before and so it should be interesting to see how we do," Atkinson said.

The Sunshine Girls were winless on their recent tours of New Zealand and Australia but the English will take little comfort from those results."We are not going to take notice of their recent results over in Australia and New Zealand because we have heard that they have got back some of their more experienced players for this series," Atkinson said. "They are also building for the Commonwealth Games, and so we are expecting it to be really tough for us."

The English team is scheduled to play Berger Paints Super League runners-up Jamalco in a warm-up game tomorrow at the GC Foster College in St Catherine.