Director of cricket Simon Cook has explained why there will not be a big overhaul of Kent’s playing squad over the close season after County Championship Division 1 relegation.
Kent will return to second-tier red-ball cricket in 2025 for the first time since 2018 under the guidance of a new head coach.
After a campaign in which Kent have claimed just one County Championship win, and collected only nine batting points, as well as failing to reach the knockout stages of both the T20 Blast and One-Day Cup competitions, some fans have called for a complete reset of the playing staff.
But Cook responded: “It won’t be a complete reset.
“We will sit down and recruit a coach first. Then, we’ll sit down and work out if – and where – we need to make changes.
“But you have got players within contracts so it’s not quite the football model where it’s all out and all change.
“There will be minimal changes.”
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That news may not be what Kent supporters necessarily want to hear but, quite simply, it’s how professional cricket works.
“It’s more of a kind of long and drawn-out process,” explained Cook.
“Sometimes, you might think ‘That’ll be easier so let’s just do that’ but it’s a longer-term process than that. You have got players in one-year, two-year and three-year contracts.
“We have also got to work out where we are deficient. There’s always going to be injuries and other bits and pieces but we’re limited with our budget.
“It’s not just a case of saying ‘Oh, we’ll recruit in and wait for a player’s contract to expire’ – we haven’t got the finance to be able to do that. We almost have to wait for a one-in, one-out kind of thing.
“It’s a little bit more nuance than clear the decks and start again.”
Cook also gave an update on what kind of interest there had been in the head coach role as the board starts to prepare to begin the process of finding Matt Walker’s successor from next month.
He said: “Aside from (ex-England one-day head coach) Matthew Mott being attached to it 28 minutes after our announcement?!
“There’s been significant interest, mostly agents phoning up and saying ‘Right okay, this is my list of coaches’. To be honest, I’m keeping a very open-minded approach to it.
“We need to sit down with the board and understand what direction we want to go down.
“Is it going to be one-day cricket? In that case, that’ll form the slant in terms of the skills the coach is going to need to have, and in terms of how we’ll develop the players in four-day cricket.
“There needs to be a nice balance. It cannot just be a T20 franchise coach.
“We need a nice, broad, balance, and to try and get as much interest as we can.”
While there’s no set style of play Cook is looking for from the next man to take the top job at Kent, he’d prefer an attack-minded head coach.
He said: “There’s no set style of play that I would envisage.
“I would like a coach to be on the positive side.
“I would like a coach to have a very clear vision of what they want and how a team sets up under their leadership, as well as a coach that has strong values which align with a lot of the work the players have done within the culture of the playing group. I think that’s really important.
“Obviously then, you start to align more with where the focus is – is it more white-ball development or is it more red-ball?
“That’ll need more confirmation from the board, although I know where I want to go.”
Cook also commented on the conversations he’d had with Walker – a former team-mate and a friend.
“We had said that we were going to do a review of the season,” he said. “Performance cycles are generally four years and Walks has been through eight years here as a coach so he’s been through two of those performance cycles.
“Essentially, he has to sit down and work out if he can do another four years. He felt his time was done.
“He’s given so much to the club and actually felt that he just couldn’t do another four years.
“That was the conversation.”
While there is, understandably, plenty of frustration around Kent’s 2024 campaign which has ended in relegation, Cook does potentially see brighter times ahead.
He also revealed some of the pitches at Canterbury are to be relaid.
He said: “You do need to try and zoom out a little bit.
“It’s very easy to kind of really focus in and be a bit all doom and gloom about it.
“But actually, if you do have a long-term view of this and start to look at what is in our pathway, what’s in our Academy right now and, also, the work we have started to do underneath that – which hopefully will start to bear fruit in five, six or seven years’ time – (hopefully that) can combine with what we’re going to do with the pitch.
“We’re going to dig up a couple of pitches this winter and relay the soil, so we can try to get better surfaces to play on.
“That’s also one of the things that we have struggled with because the pitches are dying here. There’s been a bit of a lack of investment into that. We need to start looking at that.
“We really start to build a foundation – not only with the players – but, literally, from what’s underneath their feet so that we can move the club forward in a long-term strategy.”
Relegated Kent saw the first day of their season-ending County Championship Division 1 match at Durham abandoned due to heavy rain without a ball being bowled today.
