THIS year’s Royal London One Day Cup campaign was a pretty tough pill to swallow. We put a real focus on white ball cricket over the winter and while that certainly showed in some areas it was frustrating to come away with the results we did.
We played some really good cricket at times I thought, and there have been vast improvements on last year, but we still haven’t been good enough to consistently win. Before the season started, as a group we asked for more big partnerships – we had a few of those. More hundreds, we had a couple of those, but no-one really grabbed the game when we needed it.
There were a lot of good individual performances – Rob Keogh especially – and most of the batsmen have done well. It was great to see Rob show his class, particularly after missing so much of last year with his finger injury. Ben Sanderson has been bowling incredibly well, the amount of times he beats the bat is unreal. You find yourself standing at slip and just expecting an edge to come your way every ball.
All in all it’s been another tough tournament and one that’s pretty hard to reflect on. If you’ve been really bad you can always put your finger on why and you can talk a lot of hard truths in the dressing room, but when you play okay and don’t win the game it’s a bit more difficult. Looking back I feel we should have won five games comfortably and then a couple others could have gone either way. We were undone by the weather against Yorkshire after putting on a massive total but we should still have been competing for a quarter-final.
The focus now shifts into red ball cricket again with a big block of eight Championship games back to back before the Blast starts later in the summer. While it’s a shame that Jason Holder has finished his time with us, Temba Bavuma has arrived and brings with him a wealth of international class. The impact Jason had on the squad on and off the pitch was invaluable. He was a great presence around the club and put in some really high quality performances for us. I’m sure anyone who was at the game against Warwickshire will remember that final ball six that cleared the Lynn Wilson Centre!
It’s time to knuckle down now, there’s a few crucial games coming up and getting points on the board in the first half of the season will be key in a push for promotion to division one for next year.