Alex Gidman is looking forward to working with “one of the emerging talents on the world stage” after securing the services of Australian batsman Ashton Turner for Worcestershire entire Vitality Blast T20 campaign.
Turner is this week celebrating skippering Western Australia in their Marsh Cup final triumph over Queensland after playing T20I cricket for his country against Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
First Team Coach Gidman sees Turner slotting into the number four role as the Rapids aim to continue the T20 form which has seen win the Blast in 2018 and finish runners-up in 2019.
Gidman said: “He is one of the emerging talents on the world stage, simple as that. I believe we’ve got an outstanding player there who is literally climbing a ladder at a rate of knots.
“At the moment he is representing Australia in T20 cricket. Potentially he might break into their ODI side quite soon as well.
“We’ve got someone on the way up, a very powerful, very dynamic player, bowls a little bit as well.
“He just offers us a slightly different skill set in that number four slot which we didn’t necessarily have last year.
“We had a lot of top three and, with the signing of Hamish (Rutherford) and potentially more availability of Mo (Moeen Ali) throughout the summer, that’s what we felt we needed in the coming season.”
As with Rutherford in all formats, Turner is available for the Rapids entire Blast campaign.
Gidman said: “It works. With the last couple of years, with Guppy (Martin Guptill) missing a couple of games, we managed to get through it.
“But it will be equally beneficial having someone available for the whole campaign.
“The more consistency you have in your teams, the more consistency you have in those partnerships and pairings so generally more consistency your performances are.
“Looking forward to having those combinations for long periods of time.”