Smith appointed Leicestershire first team coach

Leicestershire, reeling from an awful season, have reorganised their coaching set-up in a bid to find improvement.

For the first time in the club's history, the team failed to win a first-class game all season - they lost to Leeds-Bradford MCCU, too - and recorded the lowest points tally (79) by any team since the introduction of two divisions in the County Championship. They finished 70 points adrift of the rest at the bottom of Division Two.

As a result Phil Whitticase, who was previously known as the head coach, has been named as director of cricket, while Ben Smith is now the senior coach with responsibility for the first team. Lloyd Tennant has been appointed as senior coach with responsibility for the 2nd XI.

"The club felt that with all the responsibilities I had to deal with there was a need to realign and have a clear focus to the requirements of the team," Whitticase said. "This has been achieved by restructuring the roles of the coaches and I believe this will be in the best interest of the club."

The club raised some eyebrows when its chairmen, Paul Heywood, sent out a message to members towards the end of the season. Among some genuinely encouraging items of news - such as the club having secured a tour game against India in 2014 and expressing confidence that they would hit their financial budgets - he included the more prosaic item: an ice cream trolley has been purchased so ice cream is now available at every match.

While Leicestershire supporters will, no doubt, he delighted to hear that, they may be more interested in how the club can improve on the pitch and how they can keep hold of a clutch of their better players - the likes of Ned Eckersley, Josh Cobb and Shiv Thakor - when their contracts expire.