IT'S Thursday lunchtime at Kidderminster, the second day of the four day game with Essex.

The Worcestershire players find different ways of maximising those precious minutes with the feet up.

Essex can enjoy the lunch hour and look forward to feasting in the afternoon sunshine on a pitch which needs a more pressurised situation to reveal any menace.

It's a day when it seems good to be an ex-Worcestershire cricketer. The invitations from the dressing room to borrow some whites for a spell in the field do not seem tempting.

The only good thing about Kidd-erminster during sessions like the impending one is that it's not too far to run to the boundary to fetch the ball back.

There is something in the pitch here though. Not many games have been drawn since cricket has resumed at Chester Road. But it takes someone who is hitting the deck hard and the seam regularly to find that something. Or it takes someone with enough control to exert pressure and enough guile or spin to defeat the attacking shot which results from the pressurised frustration. The sort of qualities you look for, in fact, in a Test match player.

It's a pity Glenn McGrath isn't here to enjoy the pitch. How pleased I was to hear him echoing my thoughts on the quality of pitches in this country and the detrimental effect they have on our cricketers when he was questioned about his experiences in England on his recent return to Australia.

Kidderminster is a pitch on which there is an expectation that batsmen will score runs and that brings its own pleasure, much as in a Test match where batters are expected to succeed on good pitches. Thrusting forward to counter movement and thrashing at anything off-line, legacies of playing on poor pitches, are not part of the equation. Rather, the balance and straightness of Stuart Law are required, qualities all too evident as he helped himself to a second successive hundred off the Worcester attack. How we have suffered at the hands of Australian batsmen in this middle third of the season. And if we go with the rest of Glenn McGrath's comments, these players have no more talent than our own!

Kidderminster attracts a goodly crowd and again I felt the value of taking cricket out to other parts of this county and the country in general. One further benefit would be that there would be more time for beleaguered county groundsmen to work on their own squares and net areas: one downside is that Kidderminster, like many outgrounds, does not have good net facilities.

How good it would be to see ECB money directed at this crucial area. Talk to players who've been to Australia and one thing they'll all say is how intense the net sessions are. "Netting" is a sport in itself; a cut and thrust work out. And it can be so because the surface is good. Just because there's a net round them does not mean that net practice is in anyway unrealistic.

Professional and amateur players alike would benefit from quality practice areas and perhaps this would go some way to bridge the gap between the performance of English players relative to their Australian counterparts which exists despite the fact that, according to someone who should know, there is no difference in talent!