Nottinghamshire returned from their pre-season tour of Barbados this weekend, with Mick Newell decidedly happy with how things went.
“It’s all gone as smoothly as in the last few years,” said the Director of Cricket. “We’ve been blessed with ideal weather to start our outdoor preparation and as usual the practice and training facilities have been ideal. The hospitality afforded us is always excellent, so it’s been a very enjoyable trip.
“In terms of the cricket, we’ve had another good run in the T20 competition, it’s always nice to play well and win. And we’ve had four good days of red ball cricket, which hopefully puts us in a good position to continue our preparation back in England.”
There were many pluses for Newell, particularly in terms of some outstanding individual performances.
“It’s an interesting time of year. You want your best players to find form early, so to see Samit score two hundreds is obviously very encouraging and at the same time you want the competition to be going ahead amongst players who are thinking they need to perform well to get into the side.
“There are still a number of issues to resolve over the next 2-3 weeks. But we’ve actually got quite a lot of time still left, so hopefully we can get good weather in the UK and people can move their game further forward.”
Even though Michael Lumb and Jake Libby will miss the start of the campaign through injury, Newell is looking forward to linking up with the rest of his squad over the next few days.
Vernon Philander will join once South Africa’s participation in the ICC World Cup is over, Alex Hales and James Taylor will be ready for the start of the season and there will be a further new face, that of Brendan Taylor, who has signed for Nottinghamshire ahead of the 2015 season subject to ECB approval.
“We were covering ourselves with Hales possibly getting an IPL contract and Taylor (James) possibly away with England, so with Brendan Taylor joining it means we’ll have a new addition in terms of an international cricketer to our squad, which will be good.”
Newell confirmed he’d known about the Zimbabwean’s availability for some time.
“We were aware of his interest but we didn’t rush into because we were waiting to see where we were going to be. But with the injury to Lumb and the possibility of players getting international cricket, it became a more obvious option for us.”
It seems, however, that the new wicket-keeper batsman may, like Riki Wessels, have to wait his turn for a chance to don the gloves.
“It’s good to have him as an option in case Chris (Read) gets injured or possibly to ease the workload on Chris in white ball cricket. That’s something we might look at but initially, certainly in four day cricket, it’s not going to cross my mind that we are looking to replace Chris Read. We’ve still got, as his performances have shown on tour, an outstanding wicket-keeper and a very, very good captain.”
Reflecting back to 2014, Newell admits his side ran out of steam towards the end of the campaign and it’s something he wants to address.
“We knew we weren’t the best side last year. I said third or fourth would be a fair position for us and we came fourth in the end.
“We were competing with Yorkshire when we had our best seam bowling attack but, once we lost Siddle and Adams, we weren’t up to the level that Yorkshire were still performing at.
“There might be a number of reasons, maybe our fitness, maybe the type of pitches we were playing on, maybe the way we bowled and batted, but at the end of recent years we’ve been fading a little bit.
“Traditionally our end of season record has been poor but our early season record has been very good.
“We know the type of pitches that suit our cricket, but we’ve got to get better at the end of the season and hopefully the matches at the end will be important in winning trophies.”
The countdown is firmly under way for the start of the LV= County Championship programme on 12 April, but Newell knows there’s still some work to get in first.
“It seems as though we’ve got a little bit longer when we get back than we normally have, so we’ll have a full week of nets followed by the two friendly matches and then the first-class game against Loughborough MCCU, so there’s still quite a lot of cricket if the weather allows us to be outside.”
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