Kentish Express Ashford & District
Bowling attack seams right for Championship challenge
With a squad weighted heavily on seam bowling,
Kent director of cricket Paul Downton fancies their chances of success this summer.
The county begin their County Championship campaign at Northamptonshire on Thursday – the first of eight matches in the next nine weeks.
Spinners accounted for only nine of the 87 wickets taken by Kent in the Bob Willis Trophy last season, a competition that did not get under way until August. Given the weather and early season conditions, there will be even less demand for Kent to field a spinner, regardless of the potential of Hamidullah Qadri. Marcus O’Riordan may yet get a reprieve given his undoubted talent with the bat.
That leaves Darren Stevens, who turns 45 on April 30, Harry Podmore and Matt Milnes to lead the attack. Fred Klaassen will look to push his credentials along with Nathan Gilchrist while new recruit Miguel Cummins brings extra pace to the bowling ranks. “The fact we play eight of the 10 games in the first two months of the year could work to our advantage,” explained Downton. “The first 10 games are basically qualifying games so you can focus very heavily on that.
“The fact we play most of our cricket in April and May means we are probably going to be very seam-orientated. Our strength is in our seam attack. From a batting point of view, we are going to lose Sam Billings and obviously Zak Crawley will be with England. We’ve got an experienced line-up. I think we can get off to a good start.
“We’ve got to focus on getting into the top two.
We’ve got some interesting battles against Yorkshire and Lancashire who will potentially have their Test players available too so we’ll have some big heavyweight contests at the beginning of the season.
“We can focus on 10 matches to qualify, then we’ll play white-ball cricket and then we can look at the final games. But obviously our ambition is to qualify into that Division 1 and then top the Championship.”
Changes to the competition might have gone under the radar for many given the last round of county championship matches took place 19 months ago. The Bob Willis Trophy staged in last summer’s truncated campaign opened both the door for young players around the country and many eyes to a potentially exciting format going forward. The counties have been split into three groups of six, the top two in each group will be placed in Division 1 later in the season where the eventual winners will be crowned champions. The top two in Division 1 will also face off for the Bob Willis Trophy. Downton believes it could be a positive step forward. “Divisional cricket has its positives and negatives,” he said. “The idea of best versus the best is great but it leaves half the sides almost in a twilight zone.
“All 18 counties start the year with the potential of winning the championship which is exciting. The fact you get eight points for a draw is interesting too so I fear that could lead to some defensive cricket but I know from an ECB perspective teams fighting it out for four days is what they would prefer to produce Test cricketers. “The game remains undecided in terms of what the future of the County Championship is, but I think we should give this a good go and I would be in favour of continuing this experiment for two or three years to see how it works out.”