With Kent’s season finally underway – albeit four months late – coach Matt Walker has been talking to KSN about the challenges ahead now that competitive cricket has finally returned.
“We know its going to be a bit more-tricky this year with what’s going on,” he said, “we know that we’re going to have to rotate a few players which means we might not always put our best side out on the park. We’ll chop and change on the bowling front – I think we have to! We said from the outset that we have to be little bit careful.
“The numbers at Chelmsford for some of the seamers were up a bit higher than we would have liked – under normal circumstances that’s Ok just about, but these aren’t normal circumstances! The players haven’t done a huge amount to be anywhere near that bracket of overs per week – we’re just going to have to take a closer look at the numbers and make sure that we don’t push anyone into the red-zone!”
“We made a real philosophy around that at the start of the season – we want to be competitive, of course we do, but equally we want to protect our seam bowlers! It may seem a but cautious and other clubs might do it differently but our medical team are a very important part of our club – they’ve great expertise – and I think if every theres a red flag and his work level goes through the roof, we might just have to rest a few.
“There will be a couple of changes for the weekend – we need to see how people have recovered since Tuesday, but it won’t be too dissimilar to what we saw against Essex. They all feel like they could play every game but I think that the bigger picture for me is next year and that we come out of this season unscathed with injury or anything significant on the injury front so that we can got through the winter getting guys back up to speed and hit next year really hard and really try to compete for the Championship.”
“Don’t misunderstand me – we want to be competitive and we want to win and that’s always number one but we know that there is going to be risk on the medical front – there always is no matter how fit players are and players will get injured even when they’re at their fittest and healthiest – but what we know and what we’ve gone through and what the players and where they’re at physically is not where they would normally be in the second week of August, and a full winter of getting themselves ready and a really good pre-season with two, three or even four practice games.”
“Of course as it stands it wasn’t like that at all as you can imagine – we are probably being over cautious but for me its really important and certainly for the whole club its really important that we don’t put the players at risk and we don’t spin the dice because we feel that we’ve got to put our best team out there every week.
“We need to rotate the squad and we said at the start of this year before we even knew about COVID, we knew what the fixture list was like, we knew that seven Championship up front was going to be a challenge anyway. So, we would have wanted to rotate anyway and that’s why we have a squad – it’s good to be able to give people opportunities as well which is something that we’ve been very good at. We’re missing our three international players as well, and there’s no overseas players as well.”
Walker went on, “It’s a great opportunity to give people – young players – some game time and some opportunity. And whilst I say it’s a competition at the end of the day we want to win, we need to find a balance and have always done giving young players an opportunity whilst trying to win games of cricket, and I feel that we’ve got the squad to do that with.
“We’ve got some experienced players in there, we’ve got some with mid-range experience and we’ve got some very inexperienced players – and to try and give everyone a taste of first team cricket whilst we can, and can give people some exposure and some opportunity, whilst also keeping some of our prized assets, then that’s what we need to do.”
“So, it’s very much a balance this year – trying to be as competitive as we can whilst also giving some opportunity and looking out for any injury concerns that we don’t want to have at the end of the season.”