Dan Christian, the former Australia international who initially signed for the NatWest T20 Blast competition, has extended his stay with Nottinghamshire and will feature in the Welbeck Weekender.
The Outlaws face Warwickshire and Glamorgan on Saturday and Sunday respectively at the northern outpost venue and Nottinghamshire Director of Cricket Mick Newell says he made the decision due to Christian’s all round capabilities.
“Dan is going to play the first three games for us, then we will re-assess at the end of that,” said Newell.
“I’m not sure we’ve used him quite well enough in T20 cricket. Potentially he could have batted a little bit higher, but when he hasn’t had much of a bat it’s because people have played well ahead of him.
“We haven’t got the best out of him so far, but he is a very good cricketer.
“We like the all-rounder aspect, we’ve thought a lot about the balance of our team and we need all-rounders in it.
“We don’t have too many of our specialist batsmen that bowl; Alex Hales, James Taylor, Brendan Taylor, Riki Wessels and Michael Lumb, they don’t bowl.
“If they’re going to play, and if Chris Read is going to play, we need to have some all-rounders to make sure we’ve got six bowlers in the team.
“We’re going into 50 over cricket with Dan and Steven Mullaney as your two all-rounders and Will Gidman and Brett Hutton give us a bit of strength-in-depth in that area.”
With the Royal London One-Day Cup providing a fresh competition for the in-form Outlaws to target, Newell believes recent impressive form in four day and T20 cricket have provided a timely confidence boost ahead of back-to-back fixtures at Welbeck, starting with Warwickshire tomorrow.
“You always want to have a tilt at winning things and last year we were going into August thinking we could win all competitions," he said.
“This year, realistically we’re not going to be county champions. There’s one competition we could win, but it hasn’t even started yet.
“Let’s worry about getting to the quarter-finals and if we can do that we’ve got a chance.
“Had we played tonight, whatever happened elsewhere, we wanted to keep that winning run going.
“We’ve played good four day cricket for the last three matches and good T20 cricket for the last three matches, so combined we’ve got some form behind us.”
Welbeck Weekender Ticket Information & Car Parking
General admission is priced at £10 per day, with a £5 charge for parking. Entry and parking is free to Nottinghamshire Members.
Don’t miss out on the next step of our summer of cricket and join us at the Welbeck Weekender, where tickets will also be available to purchase from the venue on each day.