Richard O'Sullivan

---

On his second visit of the year to Italy, EDP coach Richard O’Sullivan visited the distinctly different areas of sunny Cagliari and snowy Ispra.

In Cagliari, on the beautiful island of Sardinia, he found a dedicated group of locals who have the passion and dedication to promote and develop the game.  One of the key individuals is Sergio Melis, who teaches at a local superiore school and who, along with the President of Karalis CC Vincenzo Sau, created a team to enter the FCrI U15 tournament in 2003.

Richard’s visit was primarily to help Sergio and Karalis CC expand this to other schools and create a sustainable programme that can lead to local competition.  Over two days local teachers attended a cricket introduction and Karalis CC and Richard explained their important role in helping local Club/School Link officers from Karalis CC introduce the game to their schools.  The intention is to follow this with an annual schools competition.  Obviously then interested children could join in the club training.

The evenings presented the opportunity for Richard to train the local adults and last year U15s jointly.  The adults, who will be linked to schools to introduce the game, covered an appropriate lesson that will hopefully interest the children and, following this, the evenings were dedicated to skills and exciting pairs matches on the floodlit synthetic football pitches that acted as the training facility.  With the weather being mild and temperatures in the mid-teens celsius this was more than possible outside.

However, when Richard transferred to Euratom CC in Ispra (north-west of Milan) he was greeted by a completely different climate, with snow and ice all around.  Luckily Euratom CC has one of the best training facilities in the country.  Richard has visited Euratom CC previously and was pleased to be able to use their newly renovated ‘indoor bubble’ to train not only their talented juniors but to demonstrate to the cricket playing adults a number of games and methods of training their own players, both adult and junior.  With sessions on scoring and various coaching videos all shown in the fantastic technological wonderland of the Euratom Auditorium the week was a not-stop series of exciting cricket events and initiatives.