Sussex have sacrificed their traditional pre-season trip to Dubai to finance a second overseas signing for the NatWest T20 Blast.

The Sharks have already secured New Zealand batsman Ross Taylor for the first half of the season in all formats which will cover the majority of their group games.

Head coach Mark Davis has now confirmed that the county are close to bringing in a second overseas player in an attempt to improve their fortunes in the shortest format of the game.

It will be the first time since the schedule of the domestic Twenty20 competition was changed in 2014 to stretch the group fixtures out over a couple of months that Sussex will operate with two overseas stars playing in tandem.

Last summer Mahela Jayawardene and George Bailey only appeared together in the quarter-final defeat to Northamptonshire while in 2014 Yasir Arafat was the sole overseas player. The previous season they fielded Dwayne Smith and Scott Styris together.

Davis said: “I think we are going to have two for Twenty20 this year and I’ve been on the phone to Luke (Wright, captain) regularly over Christmas discussing whether it should be a bowler or batter and the potential options.

“The budget doesn’t allow us to get a top guy so we have to be clever. We can only really afford to bring in a second player at all because we won’t be going to Dubai this year and will be working with a slightly smaller squad overall.

“We’ve been to Dubai for the last ten years and it has served us well but we decided that it was better use of our resources to stay at home this year and use the money we save to get the right players on the pitch.

“We’re really happy to have been able to get Ross on board and hopefully we’ll be able to get someone nailed down for the second overseas spot before the end of January but it is always difficult as people don’t know their availability.”

Wright – who is currently playing in the Big Bash League in Australia – is also putting feelers out to identify a potential replacement for Taylor from the end of July when his spell at Hove comes to an end.

Taylor is expected to be part of the New Zealand squad for a Test series in South Africa meaning he will miss what Davis hopes will be a push for honours on all three fronts.

Davis added: “To have someone of Ross’s calibre for so long is fantastic but we are also aware we will be losing him at a vital stage of the season. Hopefully we will have qualified for the knockout stages of the 50-over and Twenty20 competitions and will be in the running for promotion in the Championship so we need to have someone suitable to bring in as a replacement.

“It would be premature to sign a batter or a bowler now though as we don’t know where we will be at that stage. It makes sense to wait to see where we might need reinforcements and to take into account any injuries.

“You’ve also got the issue that players don’t know about their availability until national squads are announced so all you would be doing now is guessing. There is the possibility that whoever we sign as our second overseas player for Twenty20 could stay on for the second half of the season but that depends on whether they fit what we need.”

Instead of playing in an annual Twenty20 tournament in Dubai and playing warm-up games against the likes of Lancashire and Yorkshire they will spend three days at a team-building camp at Desert Springs in Spain in March.

Sussex will then take on Surrey and Hampshire in two-day friendlies at Hove before a four-day match against Leeds/Bradford MCCU ahead of the season opener against Northamptonshire at Wantage Road.

“We won’t be playing much cricket in Spain,” said Davis. “It will be more of a team-building exercises where we all get together and discuss how we want to attack the different competitions.”

l Sussex bowler Lewis Hatchett took 7-21 for the Darren Lehmann Academy against the Future Stars Academy in Australia yesterday.