Wes Durston hoping playing experience can push Loughborough Lightning to Kia Super League glory

Durston was an ever-present in the Somerset side that were Twenty20 champions in 2005, beating a Lancashire side containing Ashes hero Andrew Flintoff in the final

Handling the pressure of the big occasion is as important as playing skills for a cricket team with aspirations of winning a major trophy and when Loughborough Lightning take the field on Kia Super League Finals Day on Sunday they will have not one but two people in the camp who know exactly what it takes.

In addition to Matthew Hoggard, the former England fast bowler who won the Twenty20 Cup with Leicestershire in 2011, the former Somerset and Derbyshire batsman and spin bowler Wes Durston is now in the Lightning dugout. Both are assistant coaches to head coach Rob Taylor.

Durston was an ever-present in the Somerset side that were Twenty20 champions in 2005, beating a Lancashire side containing Ashes hero Andrew Flintoff in the final.

“I was lucky enough to have a career in which I played more than 100 matches in each of the three formats,” Durston said.

“I played for Somerset in the 2005 T20 final and I was 12th man on another couple of occasions, so I know what it’s about.”

Lightning qualified for Finals Day with two matches to spare when they knocked out defending champions Surrey Stars last week and already know they will face Southern Vipers in the semi-final at Hove on Sunday, with runaway league winners Western Storm waiting in the final later for whoever comes out on top.

It is a third Finals Day appearance for skipper Georgia Elwiss and her Lightning team, having lost out to Storm in the semi-final in 2016 before finishing runners-up to Stars last year.

Durston will pass on all the benefits of his knowledge, although he admits there is only so much a coach can do on the training ground.

“It is about staying cool in that moment and being able to execute your skills when you are put under the most pressure possible,” he said. “But it is hard to replicate a pressure situation in practice.”

Durston’s club-record 111 off 59 balls in a T20 for Derbyshire in 2011, coming a year after he had smashed 117 for the Unicorns in an historic win over Sussex in a 40-over match the year before, left him with the label of a one-day basher.

Yet he scored more than 5,000 runs in first-class cricket, with six centuries, and took 119 wickets with his off-spin.

“I think I got pigeon-holed quite early on as a T20 player, which grated on me a little bit because I enjoyed playing all three forms,” he said. “But I guess my record would say that T20 was the one for me.”

The Somerset-born player retired in 2016 and is now focussed on building his career as a coach.  He coached cricket and hockey at Oakham School before joining the Loughborough MCCU coaching staff, alongside Taylor.

He says his ambitions were to coach long before he finished his playing career. 

“I’ve always wanted to coach,” he said. “I did my Level One qualification back in 2001 and every winter alongside playing I would be working at Millfield School or Oakham School.

“I always envisaged I would end up in some kind of educational role and coaching would be a big part of it. I’ve now got my Level Three.

“Coaching is where I see myself, which is why it is great working in Super League with this standard of girls.

“I was impressed from day one with the standard of the players and their eagerness to learn.  The girls are so keen, they are sponges and soak everything up.”

Durston, who still lives at Oakham School - his wife Emma is housemistress of one of the residential halls - is also an author, having co-written a book on captaincy called A Leading Edge.

The book is the first of a series planned by Durston with his former Oakham School colleague, Patrick Latham, who played Second XI cricket for Durham and Somerset and for Cambridgeshire in Minor Counties.

“I love captaincy too and the mental side of the game,” Durston said.

“We noted that in young teams the captaincy would often be given simply to the best player, which is not always the best idea, or that a coach would also captain the side, which meant that he would be making all the decisions on the field and there would be no learning.

“The players would not know why the coach had changed the field or changed the bowler. 

“As a coach you haven’t got all the time in the world to sit down and explain every decision and Patrick Latham and myself felt that we wanted to empower the boys and girls to make those decisions themselves, even if they get them wrong. That’s part of captaincy, you learn.

“The book draws on our experience and the experience of others that we have interviewed and aims to help young captains to recognise certain situations on the field and be able to make good decisions.

“We were just going to write blog posts or articles at the start but it just spiralled from there and it was great to get it out there in print.

“We are writing another one on bowling now. The plan is for there to be a series of books.”

Lightning, who play Vipers at the Ageas Bowl on Wednesday evening (6.30pm) in the final fixture of the KSL league phase, now have a chance to show how much their players have taken on board.

“The beauty of the Super League is that you’ve got 10 games in a short space of time so if you make a mistake you can learn from that mistake and put what you’ve learned into practice immediately,” Durston said.

“When it comes to Finals Day we will have learned so much over the 10 games that hopefully we can execute on the big stage.”

Courtesy of the ECB Reporters Network.