Surrey Hand Out Five Emerging Player Contracts for 2010

28 September 2009

Surrey County Cricket Club have given ‘Emerging Players’ Contracts to five of the Club’s teenage stars who helped secure the Second XI Championship this season.

The contracts, which were first announced at a Members’ Cricket Forum at the Brit Oval last week, have been handed to batsmen Tom Lancefield and Seren Waters alongside pace bowlers Tom Jewell and George Edwards and leg spinner Muhunthan Harinath.

All five are members of the Pemberton Greenish Surrey Academy and have played regularly for the Second XI in 2009. They will be given tough winter regimens by coaches Chris Adams and Ian Salisbury when they report back for duty on November 3rd. The contracts will tie the players to Surrey for a year without affording them status of full members of the first team squad.

Two of the players have already made their competitive debuts for the Surrey first team – Tom Jewell against Northamptonshire on September 13th and Tom Lancefield against Leicestershire on September 27th – and Waters, Edwards and Harinath will be registered for the whole of the 2010 season.

Waters, 19, opens the batting for the Kenyan national team and has already been on an Emerging Players contract for a year. He has a first class best of 157 not out scored against Canada in Nairobi earlier this year and has played fifteen times for the Second XI in 2009.

Lancefield, 18, has played eleven times for the Second XI in the current season with a best of 118 not out. He has played age group cricket for Surrey for many years and recently was also employed on the London Wasps Rugby Union Academy.

Edwards, 17, has recently trained with the England U19 squad and earlier this year became the first sixteen year old in recent history to take a five wicket haul for the Second XI in a friendly against Durham in Purley. He is already regularly clocked at 80mph and has played eight times for the Second XI this year.

Harinath, 18, is the younger brother of existing Surrey professional Arun Harinath and has played six times for the Second XI during 2009. Alongside his brother, he was part of the Sutton CC side that recently won the ECB Shepherd Neame Surrey Championship Premier Division.

Jewell, 18, made his first-class debut against Loughborough UCCE in 2008 and has played ten times for the Second XI this year. He was rewarded for his consistently good attitude and performances with two NatWest Pro40 starts in 2009, away trips to Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

Speaking about the decision to award the players contracts Gus Mackay, Managing Director of Surrey Cricket, said: “At the start of this year, there was a distinct policy decision made to play the Club’s young players in the Second XI wherever possible and it has paid off with a magnificent Championship victory last week, where seven of the twelve players were Surrey U19s.

“The future development of these players is of vital importance to the fulfilment of our ambition to become the best domestic team of the next decade and they will definitely benefit from the increased responsibility and exposure to first team situations that these Emerging Player contracts will give them.”