Worcestershire Head Coach Alan Richardson said there are many advantages to be gained as a cricketer and learning about life from spending the winter playing abroad.
A group of Worcestershire players, including Ethan Brookes, Ed Pollock, Josh Baker, Gareth Roderick, Kashif Ali and Adam Finch are spending all or part of the close season playing in either Australia, South Africa and Pakistan.
Richardson himself spent many winters as a player abroad during his distinguished career and knows the benefits first hand of such experiences.
He said: “There are some benefits from staying at home in terms of trying to do some further education or some work experience alongside your fitness work, any rehab you need to do, and any real changes you want to make cricket wise in terms of technical changes.
“But, for me, going away, it is a completely different dimension. It’s an opportunity. It’s a life skill to go overseas and look after yourself, to have an amazing experience of a different culture and a different country.
“I played for about 15 years and, more often than not, I went away in different guises and absolutely loved every single one.
“It’s an opportunity to build relationships with people you don’t know and it’s your opportunity to buy into a club and you can never get enough practice at that, integrating yourself and investing into a new team.
“You are playing cricket outside, you are learning the game all the time, you are coming up with lots of different challenges in different environments about players you don’t know about.
“It stimulates the body and the mind massively for me and going away as often as you can is amazing.
“You get to train in the week, all your physical and technical work, and then you get to try and implement it on a Saturday and Sunday.
“For me, more often than that, it should be a huge benefit for players who do it.”
The bulk of the players heading overseas will not return until mid March.
Richardson explained: “We are asking the guys going away not to come back until the middle of March, and then they can just hit the ground running.
“You almost stop if you come back here and we are relying on weather.
“The guys away playing cricket in the heat of Australia and South Africa, they should take that for as long as you can.”
