Kent head coach Adam Hollioake has admitted he questioned whether coaching was the right career path for him at the beginning of 2026, before the county transformed their fortunes to sit second in County Championship Division Two heading into the final match of the season.
Hollioake was named as Matt Walker’s successor in December 2024. Kent finished bottom of the Division Two table in his first campaign in 2025, and the early weeks of 2026 brought further difficulty, with back-to-back rain-affected draws followed by an innings defeat at Worcestershire.
“I guess you’re just trying to get things right. “There was a time at the beginning of the year when I was questioning whether coaching was actually the right thing for me! Of course, we all have self-doubts at times. “I know I’m pretty stubborn and pretty resilient. I can be difficult to work with – as some of the people here will attest to – so, when I refer to myself as being stubborn, I’ve sort of demanded we keep those standards high and keep coming back to them. “I kept on trying to reassure the guys that it would turn around. There was a time where I wasn’t sure if that was going to be the case. But I’m glad to see now it’s starting to get some positive results,” Hollioake said, speaking to Kent Online in an exclusive interview.
Kent now head into the final match week of the 2026 season in second place in Division Two, four points ahead of Northamptonshire. Durham have already been confirmed as Division Two winners. The top two sides will earn promotion to Division One of the 2027 Rothesay County Championship.
How did Kent turn their season around?
Kent‘s improvement across the 2026 campaign has been built on a deliberate shift in training intensity and match-to-match focus. Hollioake pointed to a significant increase in the volume of practice work compared to the previous year as evidence of how much harder the squad has been working.
“Just a little bit of an example, last year, we used a certain amount of balls and that was the budget for the year. We had expended and used all of those balls by the end of May so we hit the same amount of balls in two months as we did in six months last year. That gives you an indication of how much harder we were training and the volume we were working at. At first, I think that’s a bit of a shock to the system but hard work always pays off,” he said.
Hollioake also described a change in how the side manages results during the season. Kent had won seven red-ball matches by September 15, 2026, and secured a seven-wicket victory over Lancashire at Canterbury on September 15-17, 2026. The coach attributed the consistency to a game-by-game approach.
“A feature of what we have been doing is just taking it game-by-game. Last year, we really let poor performances get to us and we carried that over to the next game. Likewise – not that we had many good performances last year – but when we did, I think we could get a bit ahead of ourselves and think we’ve cracked it. This year, what we’re doing is we’re just staying present. We have a recipe now for what we need to do in order to succeed – and we just keep coming back to that – rather than trying to jump from win to a loss and (think) how we’re going to respond to that. Now, we have a simple template of how we’re going to play and we just revert back to that, no matter what has gone on in the game before. I’m pretty confident we can put in a good performance,” Hollioake added.
What is at stake against Gloucestershire?
Kent will aim to seal a return to the top flight for the first time since 2024 when they face Gloucestershire from Thursday at Canterbury. However, Hollioake acknowledged that even an eighth red-ball victory of the campaign might not be enough to guarantee promotion, with results elsewhere also playing a part.
Ahead of the match, Kent rested several players following the Lancashire win. Grant Stewart was absent from that fixture due to a stiff back, while Ekansh Singh was also left out after a heavy workload across the season. He was measured about what Kent can control in the final round of fixtures.
“We’ve had some tired boys so this gives everybody a chance to rest. Grant has had a bit of a stiff back and Ekansh has been worked pretty hard. He’s played almost every game this year. We should be selecting from a full squad, come the last game, which is a nice position to be. Last year, I think I was the next one to get the spikes on! We had that many injuries. It’s a nice selection problem to have,” Hollioake said.
“Northampton will do what Northampton do, the weather will do what the weather does up there, and it’ll do what it will do here. All we can do is keep executing the plans that we’ve been executing since the fourth week of the season. We keep going back to that template. If we do that, the other stuff is out of our control.” he added.
