Kent coach Matt Walker has been talking to KSN about his continued search for an overseas player to bring to the Spitfire Ground for 2021…

“It’s a complicated question to answer,” Walker confessed. “It’s never been trickier to find an overseas player for a period of time – we don’t want to sign just anybody; we want to sign someone who’s the right person who will fill the right role and will upgrade our side.”

“Yes there will be a lot of players over here playing in The Hundred but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to want to be here before and play in The Blast – let’s face it, those guys are “franchisesters” if you want to call them that and they play a hell of a lot of cricket in the IPL, PSL, the T10, the Big Bash and during our competition, you’ve got the CPL!”

“It’s so hard to find the right person and obviously especially now, it’s financially as well as we can’t just be signing players left, right and centre – we’ve got a budget that is tighter than ever, so we’re trying to find the right person who can be here to cover off a couple of formats, that could jump over two and play Championship cricket and Blast cricket – and it’s hard certainly for the start of the year as there’s so much cricket going on with international cricket and the IPL, you’ve got a pool of not very many players and it’s not just the players out there, you want to get the right one and for the right price – it’s really not easy!”

“It does cost a lot of money as it’s not just the salary, it’s everything else that goes with it – it’s the air-fares, the accommodation and everything else – it becomes a challenge to fit that person into the criteria that you have on the page, but you’ve just got to get on with it as we’ve got a very good squad even if we don’t have an overseas for the start the year, I’m pretty confident that the squad that we’ve got can deliver.”

The Spitfires coach then verified the position with Heino Kuhn, “Heino will be one of our overseas players this year as things have changed around the Kolpak registrations as they are no longer allowed to play domestic.”

“Heino has another year left on his contract so he becomes one of our overseas players for this year and hopefully we’ll have one other for quite a big chunk of the season at least.”

“You always want to be competitive and everyone understands that, and they know that we want to try and find someone who will boost the side – it’s just getting the right one!”

“I think that we’ve been pretty lucky in the last couple of years that the players we have bought in have been excellent and we want to be doing the same this year.”

“It is a challenge and sometimes you do get distracted around what other counties are doing and seeing some of the names getting banded around, but we can only concentrate on what we can do and hopefully we’ll find the right fit at some stage!”

Keep checking Kent Sports News this week as Matt Walker gives us his exclusive thoughts on the return of fans this coming season.