The new County Cricket season begins on Good Friday with Kent making the long trip to Chester-le-Street to face Durham with everyone connected with the county hoping that 2026 brings more joy than 2025 and spinner Matt Parkinson agrees.

At the recent press day, KSN spoke to spinner Matt Parkinson about the hopes of a new side going into the new season and the lows and the highs of 2025.

“It was a tough year last year,” Parkinson conceded. “It was just one thing after another and probably one of the toughest seasons of my career. On a personal not I took a few wickets but that’s far more enjoyable when you are winning.”

“It was one of those last year where a couple of injuries, a couple of bad games and before we knew it, we were in a rut of losing six or seven in a row and the season got away from us very quickly!”

“We lost a lot of confidence and when you’re low on that, you find ways to lose games as opposed to finding ways to win games and that was the rut we got in.”

“When we had no injuries and a full team, we competed – we started the Championship well batting Lancashire out of the game, but we struggled to keep players fit and were selecting from the twelve or thirteen that we had fit”

“When you lose all that experience from a side and you have young players playing who may be very talented but had no experience, you do lose confidence to win games I guess and that’s probably what happened especially when we were in good positions.”

“That said, it was a great chance last year to blood the youngsters, and we saw some good promise with all of them having moments as they looked like they belonged scoring runs and taking wickets and what have you.”

“When you are losing games, it is sometimes hard to look out for some of the younger players when you have to look after yourself!”

The one upside to season 2025 was reaching the last eight of the Vitality Blast, and Parkinson smiled saying, “We found some form in the Blast, and I actually don’t think we played that well!”

He continued, “There were moments in games where we were really good and there were games when we were really poor. But it does show that if we can find the consistency now that this group is a year older and played more games together, I think that we can do really well as to get to a Quarter Final last year without playing well is a good sign for this year!”

“Across all forms of the game, if we can keep people fit – it’s nice having the overseas players locked in for the summer and not just coming in a few weeks here and there.”

“We lost Keith (Dudgeon) after one game but to have the four lads locked in to cover the whole season does give us the boost!”