Home form was our downfall

FIXTURES

KENT’S FINAL FIVE GAMES Aug 28 Leicestershire (Canterbury) ....CC Sam Northeast admitted Kent’s inability to win consistently at home was the main reason for their failure to qualify for the Natwest T20 Blast quarter-finals.

Four of their six victories in the South Group came outside of the county and they won only two of their seven scheduled home games – the opener against Essex at Beckenham and the rainaffected game with Somerset at Canterbury.

Friday’s 10-run defeat to Surrey at the Spitfire Ground St Lawrence was their fifth in six games there and Northeast admitted that he didn’t feel the wickets prepared at HQ necessarily allowed them to play to their strengths.

He added: “Our home record has been poor, we’ve only won one out of six (at Canterbury) and that’s what has cost us, coming here and not having home advantage, not getting the pitches we’re asking for. That’s the disappointing thing.

“I don’t know, I’m not a groundsman but I’m not sure the surface out there allows Simon (groundsman Simon Williamson) to do much with it, so we’ll have to really have a think.

“We tried to play a lot more in the middle of the square because that’s where we think the best pitches are but it doesn’t happen like that.

“We go away and play on good wickets which seem to suit our batters well. Here it doesn’t, limping towards (totals of) 150, 160 consistently, we’ve not really got off to flyers.

“We’ll have to have a chat with Si and hopefully produce a few better wickets going forward.”

Northeast admitted that before the competition Kent had been confident of qualifying for the knock-out stages but conceded that they had not played well enough, often enough.

He cited the Surrey defeat as a case in point.

He said: “Before the competition we would have thought the quarter finals were a realistic goal and we’d be disappointed if we didn’t get there and we are disappointed right now.

“We don’t think we lived up to the potential of our team. Tthere are a lot of good teams around, people have recruited well but we still felt we should have qualified from this group.

“It came down to the last game and the batters will have been disapppointed not to have got us over the line.”

Northeast admitted Jason Roy’s innings of 78 was decisive on Friday but Kent had still felt confident of chasing their target.

He added: “I think as a batting unit we felt we could have chased that down but again we’ve come up a bit short.

“You always look back and think what games we could have won but the reality of it is that we weren’t good enough for large parts in this competition and we found ourselves short.

“We’ll have to have a think going forward about how we go about things and how we approach next year but that’s a long way off.

“The immediate thought is that we’re disappointed but we’ve got a lot to play for in terms of championship cricket coming up.”

‘We still felt we should have qualified’