DURHAM coach Jon Lewis believes the overseas signing of powerful Australian allrounder John Hastings will help him get the best out of the club’s promising young bowlers this summer.

Hastings will arrive at Emirates Durham ICG after his commitments with the Chennai Super Kings in the Indian Premier League in May, and he is expected to be available for the rest of the season.

The 28-year-old Victoria Bushrangers and Melbourne Stars player is primarily a strapping seam bowler, but he is also a useful striker with the bat down the order.

He played one Test match, eleven one-day and three Twenty20 internationals between 2010 and 2012.

Speaking in Abu Dhabi, where Durham are playing the champion county fixture against the MCC, Lewis said: “John’s only played 30-odd first-class games, but he’s bowled his overs in them. And that’s important to us.

“Our young seamers are good, and I want them to play.

When they do play, it’s great.

But I don’t want to break them either.

“Having guys around like Graham Onions, Chris Rushworth and Hastings, you know their bodies are strong enough to do the workload. It takes a bit of the pressure off guys like Usman Arshad, Jamie Harrison and Woody (Mark Wood) to a certain degree, who haven’t got overs into their bodies yet.

“John’s a bit different from our other seamers. We’ve got good seamers, but not what you’d call ‘hit the pitch bowlers’. They are more skiddy, pacey and skilful. John’s the thick end of two meters tall.”

Lewis accepts that his squad is thinner than last year due to the departure of some key personnel.

“Things are changing,” he continued. “The club has had to cut its cloth a little bit to fit, and the squad is definitely smaller. But the quality’s still there, definite quality.

“Some of our younger guys are going to get a go perhaps a little bit earlier than we would have liked. We would have liked to have maybe given them a bit more cricket before they got into the firstteam, but they’ll be knocking on the door this year.

“We’ve got holes in the squad with (Will) Smith and (Dale) Benkenstein leaving and Ben Stokes being distracted by other things in terms of England and now injury.

Where to fill that gap was a tricky decision to make.

“But we’ve lost a lot of overs in the bowlers who have left, and we could lose more bowlers to England.

“Onions is ambitious in that direction and Stokes as well. Wood may not even be that far away himself. Injuries can also come about as well, so I felt I had to get another seamer.

“At the start of the winter I was thinking ‘I’d really like to get somebody in for the full duration of the season’. The longer I looked at it, I realised I may be being a touch over ambitious to sign the right quality player for the full six months. I had to change tack a little bit.

“The rules make it hard that you can only sign an overseas player if they have played 15 or 20 ODIs and Twenty20s or if they’ve played Test cricket.

With the amount of cricket going on in the world, if someone’s played that sort of amount, they are probably still going to be playing international cricket.

“John’s only played one Test match, but that’s enough to qualify him as an overseas player. He’s also playing for Chennai, who are as good an IPL franchise as you’ll find.”