Director of cricket Simon Cook expects the reality of County Championship Division 1 relegation to continue sinking in for Kent’s players in the coming days.

Kent are set to return to the second-tier of red-ball cricket next summer for the first time since 2018, with a 10-wicket home loss to Nottinghamshire at Canterbury in three days this week confirming their fate.

That result means they will finish at the foot of Division 1 ahead of the season-ending trip to Durham for a game, which starts from Thursday.

“It’s a pretty sombre place, to be honest,” said Cook. “I have just walked through the dressing room.

“There’s a few small groups discussing the game that’s just gone on, the season and what happens next year. Reality is probably just starting to sink in.

“Having gone through that process as a player, and understanding that roller-coaster of emotions, when the actual reality does hit, it’s pretty hard. That’s what I can see in the dressing room right now.

“Those feelings will continue to grow throughout the next 48 hours or so, leading into the Durham game. That’s going to be a challenging game for everybody to get up (for). You go into every game with hope.

Kent’s relegation finally confirmed

“Even going into the last day here, there was still hope, with the position that we had got ourselves into (85-0 following-on) that, if we had a decent day of batting, we could have had a decent lead with a deteriorating pitch. You still hold some glimmer of hope.

“But unfortunately, that’s been snatched away from us in pretty dramatic fashion.

“It’s not too dissimilar to what we’ve had through this year, really.”

Kent picked up one red-ball victory this campaign, as well as just nine batting points.

But Cook, who is set to begin the hunt for outgoing head coach Matt Walker’s replacement, felt a variety of factors were Kent’s downfall in their County Championship campaign.

They were also without Matt Quinn in red-ball cricket while fellow bowler Michael Cohen has been sidelined since before the season had even started, too.

Cook, 47, said: “There’s been a combination of factors.

“We’ve had another year of injury disruption and senior bowlers not bowl a ball for us in (white-ball specialist) Fred Klaassen and Matthew Quinn. We’ve also had Mikey Cohen not bowl a single ball so you’re three bowlers down before you even start.

“Having said that, the strategy at the start of the year was to have a bank of bowlers that you can rely on and, with those three out, we still had enough bodies - plus the overseas players that we brought in - to compete. What you would say is the batting was our strength at the start of the season.

“The bowling actually probably did what it said on the tin. You have a group of young bowlers, who are inexperienced, who will leak a boundary-ball an over that, ultimately, means you’ll go at four-per-over. They have delivered what they’re essentially capable of delivering.

“The batting has been the really disappointing thing. We have got some high quality batsmen and our first-innings batting hasn’t really stood up at any point throughout the year. That’s pretty much reflected in the number of batting points that we have got.

“We have shown glimpses of really good resilient batting to save games. But, in reality, second-innings runs very rarely do much good for you. You’re always doing that in a defensive cause.

“You can look at the first-innings batting and say that we have lost the majority of tosses this year so we have ended up batting after spending more than 100 overs in the field. But at the end of the day, that’s cricket and we have to get on with that and deal with those challenges.

“There’s been a combination of those issues with the ball and we’ve also not been consistent enough with the bat.

“We have had some good individual seasons - DBD (captain Daniel Bell-Drummond) and Compo (Ben Compton) have got around 800 runs - and they really should be targeting around the high 900-run mark.

“Jack Leaning had his hand injury, so there’s loads of things you can put into it. But none of it is an excuse.

“Ultimately, collectively, we’ve not been good enough.”

But while the disappointment of Division 1 relegation remains raw, Cook says it may provide “green shoots of opportunity” for Kent’s home-grown youngsters.

He said: “You’re on a performance curve that is on the way down and we have pretty much hit the bottom of that. We can have a proper reset.

“Division 2 cricket does allow us to sit down and focus on one format - we probably need to sit down and figure out what format that is going to be. Then, you start diverting resources into that.

“That starts influencing team selection around four-day cricket and one-day cricket, and where you play your youngsters.

“I’ve been very vocal about the fact that I want more Kent players, more Kent youngsters, playing for Kent.

“Does Championship cricket next year provide that opportunity for a Jaydn Denly, an Ekansh Singh or a Ben Dawkins, who we have just seen score three hundreds for England under-19s in a recent series? There’s plenty of opportunities for those guys.

“In the T20s, do we pile a load of resources into that? That might mean your overseas players go into that format and not necessarily into four-day cricket.

“On the back of disappointment, there are those green shoots of opportunity for young lads.

“It’s also an opportunity for the likes of Joey Evison and Nathan Gilchrist to really step up and push his claim for an England Lions place - and above. You start to look where we’re at and then you start to look at how exciting that could become.

“We have an average age of 26 which, really, is four years light of where you want to be if you want to be properly competitive.

“We have got some really good youngsters coming through in those guys, plus Olly Curtiss. If we make some good, strategic signings around white-ball cricket, we can start to compete again.

“It may take two or three years to start competing on all three fronts but, like I said when I came into this role, it’s about trying to get a sustainable future that’s in the long-term best interests of the club rather than trying to go with short-term gains and just recruiting all the time.

“Obviously, that’ll start with the head coach.

“We will start to do some in-depth recruitment around October.”

Ex-Kent wicketkeeper Ollie Robinson, now at Durham, is expected to face his old club at Chester-le-Street.