Matt Milnes is the summer’s final Rothesay County Championship Player of the Round after his nine-wicket match haul helped bowl Kent to victory over Gloucestershire and secure promotion back to Division One.
Milnes followed up a first-innings return of 4-55 with second-innings figures of 5-33 to see Kent to an eight-wicket victory at Canterbury and nail down second place in the Division Two table with promotion rivals Northamptonshire losing to Middlesex at Lord’s.
“It’s a great moment for the club,” Milnes said. “There’s a lot of graft and hard work that gets put into a County Championship season, but to get the success at the end of it makes it all worthwhile, doesn’t it?
“It was in our hands going into the last game and we’d been on a bit of a run at home, especially in the Championship. So I feel like we were pretty confident going into the week.
“The squad we’ve got now is fairly experienced, certainly in the batting department. We’ve got some experienced batters and they know what they’re doing and they know their games inside out. They get us up to a competitive score in the first innings to get ahead of the game and let our bowlers get to work in the third or fourth innings. And that’s been the recipe for success really.”
Milnes took 54 Division Two wickets at 20.03 and a strike rate of below 40, including career-best figures of 6-12 against Derbyshire back in May, but feels he really hit his straps towards the back end of the summer.
“It feels great making a match-winning contribution in big games like that when there’s promotion on the line. It makes it even sweeter and even more special,” he said. “I feel like I’ve bowled pretty well all year. I felt in really good rhythm. At the start of the year when things probably didn’t quite fall for me, I still felt I was bowling well. So, to have the rewards come the back end of the year, I felt like I’d earned it.”
Milnes received three votes for his match haul against Gloucestershire which confirmed his place in the season’s top-10 players, earning him a place on the shortlist to win the Cricket Media Club Borders Distillery County Championship Player of the Year. The final winner will be voted on by members of the Cricket Media Club.
Ethan Bamber claimed his third successive player-of-the-match in Warwickshire’s title-clinching win over Leicestershire to finish level at the top of the leaderboard with Durham’s Matt Potts.