Adams heartened by unbeaten start

Jimmy Adams hopes Kent’s unbeaten start to the season is a sign of things to come.

The latest LV= County Championship match with Gloucestershire finished in a draw at Canterbury on Sunday afternoon. That draw, combined with the draw against Yorkshire anda win against Northants sees Kent sittingin second placein the Second Division of the County Championship and Adams believes his side more than deserve to be just six points off top placed Derbyshire; “It’s been a good start by the squad on the whole. They’ve been three totally different games in terms of circumstances, but I’m happy with the direction in which we’ve started.

“We’ve met all the challenges well as a unit and we are on our way to being able to cope with more and more challenges. We have to, because as the season goes on, there will be stiffer tests ahead.

“From what I’ve seen, I think we have the ability and more importantly, we have the right attitude. That will help us go a long way as there will be things we haven’t catered for coming up and that character plugs gaps better than whether you have ability or not.The early signs are good and I’m backing the players to continue in the same vein, stay positive and at the same time stay focused.”

What has been especially pleasing for Adams, has been how much he has learnt about his squad in the past week after they scrapped for a draw at Canterbury after being bowled out for 150 in their first innings; “Any attempt to build a fighting unit is only going to come on the back of being able to overcome difficult situations. What we want to do, is build an attitude where we embrace those situations, not hide from them and then test ourselves against them.

“We believe that is the best way to know whether we’re going in the right direction. It’s comfortable if you roll teams over and we’ll take the victories, but there is a bigger picture to building a unit and part of that is trying to overcome obstacles as we face them.

“The Gloucestershire match was a tough one and we had to come back from a pretty poor batting performance in the first innings. Starting with the bowlers, in my mind they did superbly in not letting the game run away from us.

“Yes there was a declaration, but it was at a time when the game was almost at an end. If we had been batting on Saturday evening, it might have been a different story. Credit to the whole team for coming back from a one hundred run deficit.”

Gloucestershire’s declaration, setting Kent 363 to win in only two and a half sessions inevitably led to the draw and Adams was keen to state that his side believed that was always going to be the case from a side that was missing a bowler for the last innings; “It’s always a grey area when you talk about declarations. You have to look at the fact that they were one bowler down. You can talk about the weather, but it was hit or miss as to whether we’d get showers. It’s always difficult to know how many overs to give the opposition if you are a bowler short.

“Every team has its own issues to consider before declaring, so I couldn’t comment on that, but I feel the way our bowlers carried themselves throughout the game, did a good job for us and ended up having to bowl on every day of the game. Our batters then had to come out and face the overs left and did their job very professionally.”

Jimmy Adams was speaking to Steve Wolfe of KSN

Photo: Sarah Ansell SarahCanterbury.com