7 Sep 2015 | Cricket
Head Coach Toby Radford has confirmed Mark Wallace will captain Glamorgan in the LV= County Championship match against Kent at The SSE SWALEC this week as the Welsh county plays their final home game of the 2015 season.
Radford has named the eleven to play Kent and with Club captain Jacques Rudolph back in South Africa to be with his expectant wife, as well as a change in captaincy duties, there is also a change at the top of the order with batsman Jeremy Lawlor in line for his first-class debut for Glamorgan.
Aneurin Donald returns after leading England Under-19s in the drawn One-Day Series against Australia and James Kettleborough is also back in the Championship squad for the first time since May.
Mark Wallace has been captain here for a number of years and understudy with Jacques all season, explained Toby regarding team selection issues. He has worked with Jacques closely, so is the obvious choice for captain whilst Jacques is away.
We're going to bring in a couple of younger players in Jeremy Lawlor, for his first bite in first team cricket after scoring some runs at the back of the season and James Kettleborough who played first team cricket at the start of the year will have another run now after playing some one-day cricket recently.
We're also delighted to have Aneurin back after he's been away captaining England's one-day side so he'll slip back into the middle order with us. We back these young players and believe they are quality players so we want them to go out and show us what they can do.
Since Surrey and Lancashire secured promotion to Division One in the last round of matches, the highest position Glamorgan can now finish is third, which would provide demonstrable improvement on recent Championship seasons.
We said at the outset of this season that if we can be in the top four we would see that as a real improvement, added Radford.
For most of this summer we've been fighting for promotion, unbeaten for two months, and equalled the club record of four wins in the process, so now it's about staying in that top four which gives us a lot to play for in these last three Championship matches.
Although Kent are languishing near the bottom of the Division Two table they have a good record against Glamorgan and in one-day cricket have shown their skills with progress to the knockout rounds in both competitions, so Toby Radford is under no illusions about the challenge they pose or indeed about his own charges motivations.
Kent are a very good side even though they've not had a great season in the Championship, Rob Key was back to form with a hundred last time out, Sam Northeast has scored runs in all formats and they've done well in one-day formats, Toby said.
There's personal pride at stake to motivate our players and as a club we want to be in the top three or four at the end of the season because that was one of the goals we set.
As much as we want promotion, it isn't going to happen this year, but we are also on our path of development for the club and we want to keep moving forward as do players with their own individual targets so there's everything to play for.
However, there was some bad news with injuries ruling out spinner Kieran Bull and seamer Ruaidhri Smith for the final three Championship games of the season. Ruaidhri Smith has had a recurrence of a foot injury, whilst Bull has suffered a stress fracture to his back, an odd injury for a spinner, and the cause is uncertain.
Radford said: It'll take a couple of months to get it sorted with rest and our medical staff assessing how it happened and how he goes forward.
He's a high-quality young spinner and it's very rare for a spin bowler to get a fracture so we're trying to get to the bottom of it confirmed Radford.
Glamorgan Team to play Kent: Jeremy Lawlor, James Kettleborough, David Lloyd, Colin Ingram, Chris Cooke, Aneurin Donald, Mark Wallace, Graham Wagg, Craig Meschede, Andrew Salter, Michael Hogan