Bermuda beat Cayman by 42 runs to win the 2026 North American Cricket Cup final at the Jimmy Powell Oval on Sunday.

The defeat was an anticlimactic end to a rain-impacted triangular tournament, also including the Bahamas. The hosts were bowled out for 59 in pursuit of a target of 102 to win the tournament.

Cayman had excelled in the group phase, thrashing the Bahamas by 131 runs thanks to a century from Jermaine Barker. The home team also shared the spoils with Bermuda, winning one and losing one in the preliminary round robin.

Several fixtures were washed out because of heavy rain and the final itself was reduced to a 15-over game.

Despite losing Sunday’s decider, skipper Ramon Sealy believes the gap between the two sides is closing.

“I think we’ve had a better mindset. We’ve always known we can compete with them. We have the talent to compete with them, but we never had that professional mindset to go in and execute our plans,” he told CompassTV.

Many of the Cayman players have faced the same Bermuda players from under-19 level up, he said, which lets the team prepare specific plans.

Alessandro Morris, president of the Cayman Cricket Association, said the tournament had been largely positive but also left the team with more to prove.

“It makes us aware that there is more work to be done,” he said. “We learnt quite a bit of ourselves over this tournament. We know what we need to do within the next 12 months.”

The teams will renew rivalries in Bermuda next year for the North American Championships before squaring off again later the same year in the World Cup T20 qualifies.

Morris highlighted the challenges of competing against seasoned cricketers as amateurs, who sometimes struggle to get time off work to make training, and suggested finding funds to help players prepare was a priority.

“Once we get to the point where we have players contracted and paid to play, that’s when we’ll be able to make things better for the players,” he said.

Bermuda has a set-up that allows the national squads to train regularly with significant government funds to support.

Sealy said he was hopeful that Cayman cricket could eventually benefit from a similar arrangement.

“Bermuda is a cricketing community, so a lot of them are always training,” he said. “For us, you get six men here, six or seven men there, so you can’t put in the proper training we need to take us to the next level.

“If we can get a little more funding, from government or the private sector, to pay us a little more, I think that would be the first step to competing at the senior level.”