Paul Downton started another season in the Kent hot seat this past week and his enthusiasm isn’t any different to his playing days in the 1980s.

Many forget that Downton played Test cricket as well as having a distinguished County career at both Canterbury and Lord’s, and over the next few days, KSN are going to try and get to know the man who is currently Director of Cricket at Canterbury.

In the first part of our exclusive interview, we talk to Downton the cricket administrator…

Speaking to us prior to last week’s opening Championship game with Northamptonshire, Downton reflected on the winter months at the Spitfire Ground.

“We always have busy winters and there are a lot of things that go on that people don’t imagine,” he told us. “We’re even now still on the lookout for players – especially a domestic seamer, and I’m really excited to see Arshdeep Singh as an overseas player to play the five games in the middle of the season for us.”

“He is a great white ball bowler and India are very keen, and he’s very keen to get more experience with a red ball. We’re all another year older having won two trophies in the last two years and the confidence is building nicely.”

“Obviously this is the first year without Darren (Stevens) and we will miss him, but it does provide some opportunities of our other bowlers to step up and I think that they will do,”

“It’s got more and more difficult to arrange overseas signings,” Downton admitted.

“It’s simply because of the amount of cricket that is being played around the world and the reality was that in days gone by, getting an overseas contact to come and play County Cricket was almost the pinnacle for a player if he wasn’t playing Test Cricket around the world.”

“Now with the proliferation of the T20 tournaments, to find someone who wants to come and play Championship red ball cricket is getting harder and harder, especially for a seamer.”

“Batters seem to want to come – it’s always a balancing act in terms of can you get someone for a period of time? Does that person play all formats? It’s certainly getting harder and harder.”

“With England central contracts, I think it gives you clarity so Zak (Crawley) is contracted to England but is registered with us and will be “released” by England to come and play here for us.”

“We know that he’s available for our first six matches of the summer and then The Ashes gets going and I do expect to see him play in those Test matches – we’ll see how he goes, but we’re expecting that!”

“Sometimes when you’re not quite sure, you can’t plan around things and that’s very difficult.”

Downton started his sixth season as Kent’s Director of Cricket this past week, a fact not lost on the former wicketkeeper.

“It’s flown by,” he admitted. “It’s been very enjoyable and I’m very glad and grateful that I was given the opportunity. It’s been great and I’ve really enjoyed it, and the fact that we’ve seen young players come through and Crawley establish himself in the England side; Jordan Cox got on an England tour; Ollie Robinson sadly left us as we’ve three international class keepers and I hope he does really well.”

“The next group of young players – Hami Qadri, Joey Evison, Tawanda Muyeye – are coming through strongly. It’s exciting to see them come through, and then you’ve got the group of really mature cricketers now – Sam Billings, DBD, Jack Leaning – it’s been exciting to see the side evolve.”

“Matt Walker is brilliant to work with. He’s full of enthusiasm, hard working, very honest character with Kent in his blood and he’s been terrific.”

“The fact that we’ve got clearly defined roles helps – he’s the man in the tracksuit, he runs the side, he’s the guy in the dressing room, whereas I’m the guy sitting in the office most of the time – we have a great working relationship.”

“I had a fifteen year playing career before going into the City of London, but I guess that I’ve always been involved in cricket, but of course as I started here at Canterbury with Alan Knott here, I ended up moving to Middlesex and was on their committee for a long time, for about 18 years.”

“So, I was always involved albeit at a distance, but when the opportunity came to join the England set up as MD of England Cricket, it was an opportunity too good to turn down. And whilst that didn’t finish as I would have wanted it to, it got me back into cricket!”

“You always have to push on as if you stand still, you actually go backwards. We have a very competitive batting line-up this year with nine of them looking for six slots and we’ve got four all rounders who have all scored hundreds.”

“So, looking at our batting, I think we should score enough runs. The challenge has been taking twenty wickets, but I think this year we have some different plans in terms of rotating the bowlers and all of our seamers are a year older.”

“Add that to Michael Hogan coming to lead the attack from an experience point of view could be good…”

“It’s always exciting to see the first game when the members and supporters come – there’s real passion about Kent and we’ve got a terrific membership group – and I know that everyone wants to win every game – we do too – we’ll certainly set out to try and do that!”