Tuesday, November 1st, 2016

Sharp Relishing Chance To Work With “traditional” Westbury During Winter

Sharp Relishing Chance To Work With “traditional” Westbury During Winter

Batting coach Kevin Sharp is looking forward to working with Ollie Westbury during the opener's first winter as a full-time professional with Worcestershire.

Westbury has displayed traits which are no longer commonplace amongst many young players in wanting to bat for long periods.

This was amply demonstrated with his 196 spanning eight hours on his debut for England Under-19s in the first Test against Sri Lanka Under-19s at Fenners.

He also showed his potential in Second Eleven Cricket and will spend the close season working with Sharp and the County coaches at New Road and Malvern College.

Sharp, who is also Second Eleven coach, said: "Ollie has come to the party, has made some big scores and is quite traditional in the way he plays.

"He is happy to leave the ball,he defends well, he knows his game and he is patient and for an opening batter they are great virtues.

"He is going to be with us full-time from November and is spending the winter in England with us and is going to work on perhaps expanding his stroke play and that sort of stuff and that will come.

"He has got a very high work ethic and he wants to learn and that is quite exciting."

Sharp has a key role in working on technical parts of a batsman's game before Worcestershire return to action in April.

He said: "A lot of the pros are abroad this year but cricket will start to pick up a little bit in December and it will be pretty much full-on from January onwards as it always is.

"There is the Academy stuff as well and I work quite closely with Elliot Wilson as all the coaches here do on the up and coming younger players and that is very important.

"Come November, the Academy stuff starts and we will be back doing some work with these lads and that's the next generation to take care of."