Glove affair for Salt as he plays the long game
THE gloves are on for Phil Salt as he fights for recognition as a potential Test cricketer.
At the age of 25, his County Championship debut for Lancashire against Kent later this week will be the first occasion in his first-class career that he has kept wicket.
That responsibility, aligned to a desire to be recognised as a middle-order batter going forward, was a crucial component when negotiating a move last summer from Sussex, where he broke into England white-ball squads as a destructive opener.
However, he wants to shed any conceptions of him being a limited-overs specialist.
‘If anyone wants to pigeonhole me, all they need look at is the fact I didn’t put myself forward for the IPL auction,’ Salt
told The Mail on Sunday. ‘I’m serious about playing firstclass cricket and if I’m playing as well as I know I can then hopefully my name is in and around conversations to play at the highest level.
‘Keeping is something I’ve never had the opportunity to pursue, rightly or wrongly, and without sounding too philosophical, the last thing you want to do is look back on your career whenever you’re done and think “I could’ve done this better” or “if only I’d done this, it would’ve given me more of a chance”.’
At Sussex, he was entrenched as understudy behind the stumps to then club captain Ben Brown. He was also partly a victim of his own success when it came to his role in the side’s four-day plans.
The clean ball-striking he unleashed at the top of the Twenty20 team meant he was invited to open in Championship cricket too, a role that had been unfamiliar to him until the start of the 2018 season.
‘It was a case of doing a job for the lads or not being locked into the XI. So, I went up top
and learned on the job,’ he said. But his first-class progress was stymied twice last year: a broken bone in his foot prevented him starting the season and then once the move north was agreed, Sussex refused to select him in Championship cricket.
But last year he won the first of six England caps to date when Covid forced the selection of a new 50-over squad against Pakistan.