NICK FRIEND: When Kent made their move for Milnes, he wondered whether they had got the right man. A year on – and still young in a first-class career that began later than the norm – plaudits and an England Lions call-up have followed as just reward
When Matt Milnes arrived at Durham University as a wide-eyed teenager, it was with a different journey in mind.
He was based 25 miles south of the city’s heart in Stockton on Tees, a market town and the location of a secondary campus, as he studied for a degree in primary education. He became a regular on the X1 bus service that would transport him between the two hubs – to and from lectures and sport facilities.
This was an altogether different time and much has changed since then; Stockton no longer provides courses and the two colleges it housed have decamped to Durham’s main epicentre. As for Milnes, the landscape has shifted; and in this unprecedented period of uncertainty, his is a feelgood story – a reminder of where a sheer relentlessness of determination can lead.
By his own admission, Kent feels a long way from what he once believed was likely. After being let go by Nottinghamshire at under-15 level, Milnes played much of his cricket at Plumtree, his local club. Once at university, the first MCCU trial came and went in his first winter: he didn’t get in. It is a common tale among aspiring young cricketers, not least at Durham – feted for its pedigree as a production line to the county game.
Only, Milnes’ trajectory has been less typical. “The plan was to go into teaching,” he recalls, a decision partly influenced by the job opportunities that might follow. “Cricket was obviously a dream, but never really a reality at that point. But then, I grew a little bit and my cricket grew with it.”
His path changed, as for so many others, through a conversation with Graeme Fowler. He is hardly the first to feel somewhat indebted to the former England batsman, who spent 19 years as head coach at the university, during which time 60 county cricketers emerged from his stewardship. Durham’s Cam Steel, Somerset’s Chris Jones and Surrey’s Freddie van den Bergh were among his contemporaries.
Milnes’ break came as Durham faced Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge in a pre-season university match in 2013. Samit Patel raced to 256 off 224 deliveries in a 541-run defeat for the MCCU side. Quietly, rejected at the trial stage only months earlier, he had come along to watch at his home ground and had asked Fowler for a chat, via his assistant coach Alan Walker, the former Durham bowler.
“He actually invited me into the dressing room as well,” he laughs; “I was absolutely dreading it. But with Foxy, being how he is, a spade’s a spade.
“He sat me down and I can’t really remember how the conversation went, but I remember it ending with me being asked to bowl in the nets the week after before a game against Leeds. The next thing I knew, I was bowling in the nets that morning and then he gave me his shirt with ‘Foxy 56’ on the back, I think it was, and told me I was playing. It was just bizarre. I had his shirt on for my first game – and then it all went from there.”
Milnes took 55 County Championship wickets for Kent in his first season at the club
Seven years on, there is much to reflect upon. “Personally, I don’t think I’d be a professional cricketer without the MCCU scheme,” he admits. “Obviously, there is a small chance that you get picked up by doing all right in club cricket, but the exposure you get from playing with and against good players is like a bridge between playing second team stuff and club cricket, which then gets you into the second team and it snowballs from there.
“I can’t speak highly enough of it – to study and still train; I remember doing twice as much running then as I do now!”
It is perhaps truer for Milnes than most; missing out at his initial trial after arriving at Durham without any particularly glittering background in the county age-group game, his rise has been an anthology of hard work.
He speaks with a mature, striking humility and there is an immense sense of pride in a roundabout route that culminated in an England Lions winter – effectively at the end of his first full season on the circuit.
It is the kind of transformation that lends itself to a certain narrative – the idea that Milnes, at 25, has come from nowhere. He finds that an uncomfortable notion, one that skims over the endless hours of toil and training, struggle and success. “I’ve worked pretty hard to get where I am,” he reflects. “It feels like a just reward for a lot of hard work and effort in previous years gone by, when you sometimes think that you’re never going to actually make it.
“It’s a longer process than just one season in my head; it’s a buildup of numerous years – training whilst having a job and stuff like that.”
After graduating, Milnes began working for sportswear manufacturer PlayerLayer as part of their supply chain team, “just making sure that everything coming in was coming on time – a lot of spreadsheets”. In the summer, he would take three-day stints of unpaid leave to turn out for Nottinghamshire’s second team in the hope of earning a contract, only moving on 18 months in when he was offered a deal by his home county.
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A year later, Kent had swooped, albeit on the back of just 11 wickets at an average of 47.90 – Alastair Cook, Tom Westley, James Vince and Ravi Bopara among them. “I literally did not see it coming in the slightest,” he adds with a self-effacing chuckle. “I didn’t know anyone at Kent, I didn’t know any of the coaches. I was massively surprised, baffled. I was like: ‘Have they got the right player?’”
He had first been recommended to the club by cricket analyst Dan Weston, who had become intrigued by his statistics at second team level.
“Second team cricket can throw up some gems who aren’t appreciated by some of the bigger counties,” Weston explains. In 27 Second XI Championship games spanning five years, Milnes has taken 65 wickets, averaging just 23.14 since 2017.
“You’ve got players who are good enough to play at least in Division Two. I built a model and the primary purpose of it was to use second team data to give an expected level of performance for each player if they were to play in Division Two or Division One.
“With Matt, his expected Division Two numbers were really strong. When I modelled him, it was assuming that Kent were in Division Two. If he was an ever-present, I had him modelled at taking over 50 wickets in Division Two.”
As it happened, he took 74 wickets across all formats in 2019, with 55 of those coming in Division One of the County Championship, where he didn’t miss a single game: Kyle Abbott was the only seamer to surpass his tally. You get the sense that he has surprised himself.
Milnes took a job at PlayerLayer after graduating from university
It was a remarkable way to repay what he describes as “a little bit of a punt” from Kent, and he is hopeful that he has exceeded their initial expectations. “I’m still relatively new to it all,” he points out. “A lot of people of my age have played for six years.”
To an extent, it was one of his reasons for leaving Nottinghamshire. When available, he was competing with Stuart Broad, Jake Ball, Luke Fletcher, Harry Gurney, Luke Wood and Mark Footitt for a seam bowling berth – “I felt like there was always that pressure of there being an international bowler coming back in,” he says, “and if you do play, you might not play the next game because of the depth of the squad. I could be bowling well but still not playing.”
That is not a complaint, however; rather, an acknowledgement of how far he has come since. So much has happened in so little time, though much of it can be encapsulated by a single word: confidence.
The question, then, is simple. What changed?
“I remember halfway through the season, I did some work with Allan Donald to gain an extra yard and it just clicked,” he looks back. Donald was the club’s bowling coach until leaving his role at the end of the last campaign and had Milnes bowling quicker and more accurately thanks to a few technical tweaks.
“I felt like I’d never ever been bowling as well as I had in the back half of the season. The first half of the season, I went all right but the pitches were a bit more favourable. My stats might actually be better in the first half than the second, but in the second half I was bowling better than I ever had done.
“I feel like that was just through a couple of technical things, but also knowing that you belong there. That’s massive. You’ve proven yourself at that level, whereas before maybe – at Notts – I hadn’t proven myself at that level and there was always a question mark surrounding me. As soon as you know in yourself that you belong, it’s much easier to go about it. Rather than try to prove yourself, you can almost enjoy your cricket a bit more.”
He recalls being taken out for dinner by Donald, Paul Downton, Sam Billings and Matt Walker before he had officially joined the club.
“I was sat next to Allan and I could barely look at him,” he laughs. “I was like: ‘What am I doing at a table with Allan Donald?’ It was bizarre – he’s a legend of the game. Being at dinner with him, with him trying to sell Kent to me, was quite a big selling point. I was a bit overawed by it.”
A defining moment – and a turning point in his own mind, he believes, came in a spell at Edgbaston in April during just his second Championship game for his new club, still a relative unknown with a hardly discernible record. It was the afternoon he felt as though he’d cracked it.
Tim Ambrose and Henry Brookes had put together a seemingly match-saving stand of 164 in 45 overs for Warwickshire on the final day, when stand-in captain Heino Kuhn called for Milnes. “He was like: ‘Just make something happen.’ It was quite nice to be in that position,” he explains of the sense of trust and responsibility that came with it. He dismissed both men to induce a collapse that left Kent with enough time to chase down a target late on. “I think that was probably quite a big moment for me,” he admits, “because suddenly you’re changing games.”
Milnes was included in the white-ball leg of England Lions' winter tour of Australia
As and when cricket is able to resume, it is a challenge he expects to increase – no longer an unknown quantity, his threat will be taken into consideration by opposing sides, his bustling approach and ability to swing the ball late analysed in detail. “I won’t have that advantage next season,” he knows. It was not only his wicket tally that stood him out in 2019, but the quality of those he saw off. Azhar Ali was his first competitive Kent victim; Aiden Markram, Dean Elgar, Ajinkya Rahane and Rory Burns all followed.
His England Lions stint – “again, very unexpected; I was flattered to be in it – it’s my biggest achievement to date” – means that his colleagues on that trip will be better prepared for the hazards he poses.
“They’re going to have their own plans for you; they know you as a player, how you play, how you tick,” Ollie Robinson, Milnes’ Kent teammate and wicketkeeper, told The Cricketer of his own game. He finds himself in a similar position after a maiden Lions tour.
“When the call came, it was quite baffling in a way,” Milnes admits. “I’ve only played for a season, really. It’s all happened quite quickly, which is obviously very good for me. The actual experience was brilliant – even just going out to Australia, it was my first time over there. We had a pre-tour meeting at Loughborough about how to win in Australia and it hit home what sort of setup I was actually part of.”
If nothing else, it is a reminder of how quickly this has happened: he has played just 23 first-class games – two of which were for his university as a teenager. For context, Harry Podmore – a fellow Kent seamer and a former housemate – is just six days older and, like Milnes, has found home at Canterbury via a somewhat circuitous path. He has bowled 6,812 first-class deliveries to Milnes’ 3,608. Darren Stevens, 18 years senior, has released 27,725 – more than 4,620 overs. The trio shared 159 County Championship scalps last year.
It brings Milnes – and this conversation – back to where it began. “I was very lucky that my club was very supportive in giving me opportunities in men’s cricket,” he reflects. He still turns out for Plumtree when given the chance, taking four wickets in his single league outing in 2019, having played in the Nottingham Premier League since 2008.
“When you’re that age especially, it’s literally a dream to be a professional cricketer,” he remembers of the early days. “When you’re in that [county age-group] setup, you almost feel like you’re on that path to get there. And then, as soon as you’re not, it’s quite tricky to get your head around.
“But I had ample opportunities in men’s cricket, which I actually think you could argue is probably better for your development than playing kids’ cricket sometimes. I was fortunate in that sense to get that exposure at an early age; from there, I learnt the hard way at times.”
And on Fowler? “Working with Foxy was brilliant,” he says. “He’s a very funny man, but he’s also got that presence about him, where you know not to mess him about. He expects a lot of you and I think that’s good – as an aspiring cricketer at the time, that’s what you want in a coach.
“If he hadn’t just said: ‘Yeah, you’re playing this morning’ when I’d come to net-bowl, who knows? I probably wouldn’t have had the opportunities that I’ve had. I’m very thankful that he made the decision he made on that day, as surprised as I was at the time.”
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