Coach Richard Newell says his team are desperate to earn a rematch against Orange in the upcoming final but they know they can’t afford to go into the Mudgee match thinking they have it won.

“You would think that we should be able to beat Mudgee but we certainly won’t be going into the match thinking it is a done deal. Apart from the goal of winning the match, we also need to improve, because if we do get through to the final, we know we need to be at our best,” the coach said.

Orange have been the team to beat all season and regardless of which team progresses, they know they will need to play at their very best to be any chance of a win.

Bathurst were beaten by 62 runs in their encounter a fortnight ago, managing to dismiss Orange for 172 but struggling to keep the run rate up and making just 6-110 in reply. There were positives to come from the game, though, particularly in the bowling, and Newell said his team are working hard to improve.

“There are areas that we identified at the start of the season that we needed to work on and the match against Orange last week highlighted a few other issues. We have been constantly working on things throughout the season and even now it is a work in progress,” he said.

Bathurst have the advantage over Mudgee after they had a comfortable win in their round match, but Newell said his team will have to perform better than they did in that game or they risk falling a game short of the final.

“We beat Mudgee fairly easily in the round games, but it wasn’t as good as it looked. We won the toss and chose to bat. We didn’t bat that well and we didn’t post a massive total. We were just lucky that we bowled them out for a pretty small score,” he said.

“We will be looking for an improved batting effort this time around.

“Mudgee are probably more of a bowling side. They do have a couple of batsmen who are pretty good and one of their players, in particular, can score fairly quickly, so we will be trying to make sure he doesn’t do that.”