Kent head for Cardiff this week looking for their first Championship win of the new season as they face Glamorgan at Sophia Gardens and Matt Walker believes his side are up for the challenge.

Coach Matt Walker has been talking to KSN ahead of the trip to South Wales and told us, “They’re a side who are a good side who have had a relatively slow-ish start – they’ve got good players and they’ve shown that they can fight pretty hard.”

“If we go into the game thinking that we’ve got the two big ones out of the way and if we turn up, here comes a win, will be completely wrong,” the coach warned. 

“We’ve got to raise out standard – we have no right at the moment to think that we can just turn up anywhere and win a game of cricket. We’ve got to play better than we have done over the last three games to win a game of cricket.”

“We know that against any of the teams in our group we can win, but we need to look inwards at the moment. I can assure you that there is frustration and anger in our dressing room right now and hopefully that will be focused into the game and help us perform over the four days and we put in a much better performance.”

“We’ve got to do again what we’ve done when we’ve played some really good cricket over the past two or three seasons by focusing on the small things and make sure we do them over and over again. If we do that; the result will take care of itself.”

Reflecting on last weekend’s innings defeat to Lancashire at Canterbury, Walker confessed, “It was a game that we were looking to bounce back from the Yorkshire defeat and ultimately it ended in a big disappointment for all of us. A loss by an innings and only getting two points is a big blow for us…”

“There were parts when we did play good cricket – on day one, it was our best bowling performance by a stretch so far this year! But unfortunately, what followed on day two was a bad day for us which cost us the game.”

“We let them get back into the game – we couldn’t break the partnership and had no answers which meant they went on and got a big total. Then lost four wickets at the end of the day which put us on the back foot which we were unable to get back from.”

“It was pleasing the way we responded with the bat second innings and it gave us hope going into the last day and we hoped to see the game out, but unfortunately we didn’t have enough. We didn’t perform well enough, that’s the bottom line.”

Walker then spoke about the team selection that in some quarters had raised some eyebrows especially concerning the lack of a front-line spinner.

“We want to get our spinners in the team, that’s for sure,” the coach admitted. “Our two young spinners are getting there, and they weren’t quite ready for selection the way that they were bowling, but they just need some cricket.”

“We haven’t got an international spinner – we have two young lads who are still learning the game and we want to get them in the side at some stage, but we felt that against Lancashire it wasn’t the game to play either of them.”

“It was felt that on that wicket with four seamers and Joe (Denly) and Jack (Leaning) we had enough. But as we move on and the wickets get drier, we’re going to have to get a spinner in the side and get the balance right to take some workload off the seamers.”

“From outside in, there’s panic stations in some quarters as we’ve lost a couple of games, but I can tell you it’s not like that in our dressing room – we’ve just got to make sure that we go and do what we need to do, to be better and deliver it on the field, it’s as simple as that.”

“We know where we’re going wrong and not playing our best cricket in – it’s clear what we’re not doing right – we have to make sure we learn pretty quickly, and we are doing it right!”

Picture supplied by Max Flego Photography.