Persistence pays off for Ben Compton, Kent’s early-season run machine

Even Ben Compton doesn’t quite understand what’s happened in these last few weeks. Talking to him, it’s clear he hasn’t had time to reflect on the run of form that’s made the Kent opener the leading batsman in the country, and won him a call-up for the County Select XI to play New Zealand on Thursday.

“It’s all been so relentless that I don’t think it’s really sunk in,” he says. “I’ve just been busy trying to stay in the moment.” Compton has played nine games in nine weeks, and made 129 against Essex, 104 not out and 115 against Lancashire, 89 against Hampshire, 93 against Yorkshire, 47 and 63 not out against Surrey, 140 and 68 not out against Northants. With 878 County Championship runs at an average of 109 he must worry that if he thinks too hard about it he’ll wake himself up.

This time just last year, Compton was playing for Plumtree in the Nottinghamshire Premier League, against Radcliffe-on-Trent, Cavaliers & Carrington, and Kimberley Institute, picking off runs against club bowlers who had played for a minor county, or had a match or two in first-class cricket. Compton was one of them himself. He came here from South Africa when he was 19. In 10 years of trying to get ahead in English cricket, he’d played five first class matches for Nottinghamshire, when he’d made 98 runs at an average of 14 and a top score of 20.

The rest of the time, Compton was playing for Wimbledon, or Richmond, or Plumtree, or slogging away in the county second XIs. Now he’s taking hundreds off some of the best attacks in the country. “I understand it comes across like I’ve come from nowhere,” Compton says, “People ask me where I’ve been and I try to explain that I had two-and-half years at Notts and that I was the leading run scorer in the