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Alex Sets Target For 2014

26 November 2013

Alex Gidman is targeting 1,200 LV=County Championship runs in 2014 after falling just short of that figure this summer.

The experienced batsman hit 1,125, having been freed from the responsibility of captaincy. Now, with the new fixtures for next season just out, he is turning his attention to improving on that figure in four-day cricket.

In an interview for the England and Wales Cricket Board website, Alex told ecb.co.uk: “If you have a good summer with the weather and you stay fit and play all the games - if not say 14 or 15 - as a top-class batsman you should get to 1,000 runs.

“As a batsman I'm always disappointed if I don't reach 1,000. But I think 1,000 runs is a good year, whereas 1,200 becomes a really, really good year.

“I think a bowler should take 50 wickets and I think a bowler's amazingly good season is getting up to 65-plus.

“Those are the kind of standards I would expect myself to hit. It's obviously challenging and very hard to get there all the time, but that's exactly what goals should be.

“They should be hard to reach, but reachable, and those kinds of ambitions are reachable for me every year, but obviously it's not always very easy.”

Alex is uncertain whether stepping down as skipper led to his prolific season with the bat this year.

“It's really tricky to say,” he said. “Naturally you'd say that giving up the captaincy allowed me the time to focus on my own game and it certainly did. So it obviously had a part to play in it, but to what extent I'm not totally sure.

“I found a formula, which I kept very simple, and I found a pre-game routine, which really helped. I kept consistent and I repeated and repeated.

“I think the hardest thing about cricket is the temptation to try and fix things quickly. You feel a little out of form so you try to change something to find form.

“Quite often that spirals into longer periods of poor form. I think what I did for the first time last year was trust my technique, doing the same practice routines and trust that they would come through.

“But thankfully they did. There's obviously times when you do have to change things. I was in those positions last year but I could just stick with the same things, trusting or hoping that they would take care of themselves.”

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