KENT’S chairman Carl Openshaw says he and the club’s committee are happy to put a difficult year of tough decision making behind them and look forward to a rosier future.

Though the club recorded a near £300,000 profit for 2006, it came off the back of selling Albert Chevallier Tayler’s 100-year-old painting of Kent’s championship clash with Lancashire.

The truer picture, however, is one of year-on-year deficits with near half million pound losses inside two years for the county club.

Mr Openshaw said: "I’d like to think the majority of our members do understand that it is difficult running a club like Kent these days and hard decisions have to be made in order to ensure Kent’s survive in the future.

"It was a difficult decision to sell the painting, but we had to make a judgement. The painting was an asset we were no longer able to enjoy; for insurance reasons we had loaned it to the Lord’s museum."

A slice of the proceeds of sale have already been invested into planning Kent’s ambitious scheme to redevelop their headquarters in Canterbury.

Mr Openshaw added: "It is essential to develop the ground and provide additional streams of income at a time when it is becoming more and more difficult to balance the books on income from cricket alone."