Kent captain Rob Key is hoping his side can finish this campaign on a high and get promoted back to Division One of the County Championship.
Victory against Leicestershire last week has put Kent back in a strong position with just two games left to play, starting with the game against Derbyshire at Canterbury beginning today.
A win against the league leaders could propel Kent back into second spot in the table with just a visit to Glamorgan to come next week and for Key it is important the side make the most of a great start to the season and finish these last two games with wins:
“I think we need to finish our Championship campaign strongly and it would be nice to get promotion. We have deserved it for the way we have played throughout the season so far. Again, we have let ourselves down at crucial stages, so it will be nice to finish well.”
“We’ve played good competitive cricket throughout the season and we need to make sure we go out there and play like we did at the start of the summer.”
“It’s nice to be at this stage of the year and competing. We have got these last Championship games to play and hopefully we can sneak in there and do something special.”
Meanwhile, Key was left to reflect on a CB40 campaign that saw them finish third in Group C after losing their final group game against Sussex, but the Kent captain told KSN how he felt it was a defeat earlier in the competition that damaged their chances of progressing:
“I think it was a combination of us losing to the Unicorns and we lost three or four games to the rain. The second game against the Unicorns where we only needed about 30 off 10 overs and then that got washed out, so you look back on a lot of things, but the Unicorns game at Canterbury was a big slip up.”
“There have been a lot of years where we have got to this stage of the summer and not got near to being in a contest, so hopefully we can learn from this and get over the line next time.”
“We’ve done this year with a pretty young inexperienced bowling attack. Mark Davies is not the youngest, but he hasn’t played a lot of one day cricket. We’ve fought hard and in some pressure moments we’ve played well.”
“There are quite a few positives to be taken from this CB40 campaign. We have seen the emergence of Sam Billings, Matt Coles has had an up and down time of it, but at times has shown real courage under pressure.”
“Generally, you’d hope the experience of playing some of these high pressure games, like we did in the last three games, will give them something to learn from. Hopefully we will take the disappointment and make ourselves stronger in the long run.”
Play gets underway at 10:30am on Tuesday morning at the St Lawrence Ground with the weather set fair for the next four days.