Ryan ten Doeschate / Ryan ten doeschate / 09 June 2009 / Leave a comment

Holland's star all-rounder tells us about his preparations ahead of one of the biggest matches of his life as they face Pakistan in a make-or-break encounter.

It is the night before Holland's all-important T20 World Cup game with Pakistan at Lord's.

As a squad we are calm and cool but, at the same time, excited. We are not putting pressure on ourselves but there is a lot at stake tomorrow. It is the difference between going home and staying on another week.

A win, or a narrow defeat, will put us through to a Super 8 group containing Ireland, New Zealand and Sri Lanka. Friday's win, coupled with Pakistan's 48-run defeat to England on Sunday, means we have a little cushion. We can afford to lose if we finish roughly within 25 per cent of the Pakistan total. That is assuming their score is around the 160-170 that England got against them.

However, we are not thinking about losing. We have just decided to focus on the 40 overs at hand and go for the win. Obviously we are high on confidence and we don't want to change too much. We are not going to be crunching the numbers, we're just going to enjoy it.

The four-day gap between our two games has been nice in a way. It has allowed us to reflect on Friday and watch the other games so we can look at the tactics other teams have been employed. It has also been good to spend time together as a team and I believe that has helped us preparation for tomorrow. Today we had a training session at Southgate and we just tried to keep it light. There were a lot of fun activities and a lot of fielding before everybody went to work on their core skills.

This evening we had a team meeting where the coach just emphasised the key points from Friday night's game. We had a team dinner and now everyone is having a chilled-out night trying to make sure they get a good eight hours. I think I'll be able to sleep fine as I seem to be a lot worse after the games. I'm still buzzing early into the night and even the following morning I'm playing the game through my head and reliving the fun. Tonight I just have a think about keeping the dream alive and being here for another week.

Because it is a lunchtime start tomorrow, we'll all be getting together at 8.30am to have a stretch. Then we we'll have breakfast at 9am, relax for a couple of hours before meeting at 11.15am to go to the ground. Once there, I'll spend some time in the dressing room to get my kit together before wandering over to the nets. I do the same thing every time in the nets - cuts, pulls, drives and then I might do some special work. I won't go into too much detail but tomorrow Pakistan will have two or three spinners so I'll be working to address what I think will happen in the match.

It is strange to think that we could be joining Ireland in the Super 8s and yet Australia are going home. I think ourselves and Ireland are quite fairly matched but we're the ones who set the standard for the Associate nations on Friday night by causing a major upset. That said, they obviously had an important victory themselves over Bangladesh on Monday and are already in the Super 8s whilst we're only halfway there.

Bangladesh do have some good players but I did not make that last result a massive overturn in form as I feel us and Ireland have considerably closed the gap on Bangladesh in recent times. Ireland needed just the one win to carry them through to the next round whilst we have not had that luxury. So the ball is back in our court on Tuesday to set the standard for the Associate nations yet again. It would be a feather in the cap of the ICC Development committee for two of us to qualify for the next round. That is the aim and we'll need the boldness of Friday night to get us through. Looking back, it was a special performance and I did not feel we were overawed by the occasion or the opposition.

We are a very confident bowling unit where everyone knows what their job is and bowls to a plan. So right now we are just looking forward to executing our plans and doing what we did on Friday. I honestly believe if we do that then we have a very, very good chance of going through.