Rob Key

So I don't mind that at all, as long as fundamentally you're pretty clear on what style of cricketer that you want.

And you want players that can still be aggressive, still play the best bowlers in the world, but actually are ruthless in how they go about it and are smart in the decisions they make.

No, that partnership has always been, I think it's been one of the better partnerships in English cricket, really.

And I think both of those are exciting, probably like a lot of great players where they just think there's something to do.

This is something to put right.

It's something to try and put right what went wrong.

and go on and take English cricket forward.

And I think almost their resilience to that or their, I've got the word for it, but they're even more desperate now to do that.

Well, Ben, when he's fully fit, Ben's keen to play for Durham this year.

We'll work out exactly how much that is as and when we know how much cricket he can play, along with a number of our players.

Probably the only ones that won't are a bit more the multi-format guys that...

Harry Brook, who's been away for a hell of a long time, Joe Root, people like that, who it's that balance of trying to make sure they're playing enough, but they're still going to be right in September.

And then we go to Pakistan, then Australia, all of that.

On the county game, I think that that's where we get our talent from.

I actually think that English cricket produces some serious talent and it's part of our job along with the county game to make sure that can be as good a cricketer as it possibly can.

I think over the last couple of years, we put a real premium on having a settled team, trying to get to that ashes.

Because what happens is you...

the ashes might be in 27 but actually it's 11 12 test matches and probably two of those are in bangladesh so that's completely so it's not that much cricket that you've got to get into your players from there and we wanted to go to australia with a really settled team so when we were sitting here this time last year was about right we know our team we know which way we're going to go let's make sure that they're ready to be okay for australia and onwards the india series white bulls and so on

Now, as we sit here, there's opportunity again for people, whether it's with the ball, with the bat, to go out there and show them.

Everybody has a chance, no question.