Shine looking for a vision on new Twenty 20 competition

With less than three months to go the thoughts of Kevin Shine the coach at Somerset County Cricket Club are clearly focussed upon the new cricket season that gets underway on April 12th.

One aspect of the game that the coach is currently applying himself to is the new `Twenty 20' cricket competition that is being introduced in mid-summer this year in place of the early season Benson and Hedges Cup.

Looking ahead to the new competition, during a break from his individual training sessions at the County Ground Kevin Shine told me: "Twenty 20 is going to blow cricket out of the water, because it is a completely new format of the game that we currently play and there will be some amazing changes. The bowlers will have to bowl differently, the batsmen will be playing some innovative shots and there will be some very different fielding techniques."

How was he going to prepare the players for the new competition. He told me: "Twenty 20 cricket is adding a totally new dimension to our pre-season training, because nobody has played it before. We are planning to go into a session and leave it to the players. We will go into the nets, pick two sides and film it on Cric-Stat. We will then go away and analyse the footage and from that we will formulate a plan."

He continued: " For all of us it will be a discovery learning session, and for many of us it will almost be like going back to our schoolboy roots when we played 20 over cricket. We want the players to go into this competition with their eyes wide open."

The coach added: "I don't see that Twenty 20 will affect the player's skills for normal cricket because the competition is being packaged into a short space of time in the middle of the season, so they will be able to switch it on and then off."

Somerset captain Mike Burns is certainly looking forward to the new competition. He told me: " Twenty 20 cricket should be a lot of fun for everyone, and for us it is another competition that we can win so we will certainly be up for it. It will be a good entertainment for the crowds, because it will be very quick with all aspects of the game condensed into a short space of time."