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Dent believes strong mental approach can reap rewards

10 April 2018

New captain Chris Dent wants to keep Gloucestershire on the front foot this summer as much through the team's attitude towards their cricket as their skills on the field.

Dent takes the reigns as the only player with more than 100 first class matches under his belt following Phil Mustard's departure, and he comes to the role with a fresh mind and no previous baggage or reputation for others to latch onto.

"I've not done a huge amount of captaincy, even in the second XI, and that's mainly by choice because I wanted to concentrate on improving my batting and scoring as many runs as I could" Dent told the official website. "Now seemed the right time to not only do the best I can for the team but also run it. "

"We've talked a lot during the winter about the mental side of the game and we've got some characteristics which we're going to try and stick to. Cricket can be a game where you have long negative chats if you've had a bad day, and we want to get away from that because it doesn't help players turn up the next day and perform. Sometimes in the past if we've had a bad hour in a game, we've had a bad day, so we want to try and overturn those periods more quickly."

Dent will lead Gloucestershire in both the Championship and the Royal London Cup, and concedes the latter is likely to be more challenging because of the pace of scoring and the constant need to take wickets. In four day cricket, Dent could have as many as seven or eight potential bowlers in his team and he sees rotation of them as an important part of captaincy.

"The stats seem to show that after a fifth over of a spell the chances of a bowler taking a wicket becomes a lot lower so that suggests shorter spells are the way to go" Dent added. "The use of spin will depend on the pitches but there is always a role for one, even if it is to tie up an end and even without Jack Taylor we have a couple who can do that."

"Obviously we play five games at the Brightside Ground and the wickets here can favour the batsmen in the last two days of a game, which can make it tough to get results. I've not been in any discussion about whether it will be more bowler friendly this year, but we have recruited an opening bowler in Dan Worrall and if you want to win you've got to take 20 wickets, so hopefully he can make that difference."

Dent's era as skipper starts at Canterbury on Friday against a Kent side who lost their captain since 2015, Sam Northeast, to Hampshire over the winter.

"There's a bit of a slope there which can take some getting used to" Chris concluded. "They've lost Sam but also made a couple of good signings and they are a smart, hard working team and you can never underestimate them."

"When Gloucestershire has done well as a club in the past we've had a strong team unit. We want to go out with a positive mindset and play good, sustained cricket and if we come out on the wrong side, then at least we can say we did everything we could. If we don't turn up and perform well, we can't expect to win. We played Kent in the first game last season and struggled and our first challenge is to try and rectify that."

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