WE managed to give ourselves an outside chance of promotion from LV= County Championship Division Two with last week’s nine-wicket win at Leicestershire.

However, the top two in the table – Lancashire and Northants – both won too, so we are still 25 points behind the second promotion spot.

Northants will be coming to New Road for the final game of the season and, hopefully, we can keep our chances alive into that match.

While promotion is still mathematically possible, we have to keep believing and trying to win as many points as possible.

You can’t look too far ahead, though, and we have an important game at Chelmsford against Essex this week.

There are still four or five teams chasing a promotion spot and a win down there this week would keep us in the hunt.

Essex are obviously a good side and there are not many better teams on paper in the whole country, let alone in Division Two.

We will not be playing them on paper, though, so hopefully we can turn them over this week and keep our promotion hopes alive.

We lost the toss in our match up at Leicester, so they chose to bat and our bowlers did well to dismiss them for 274 on a slow track that offered little assistance.

Still, I felt we could have bowled them out for less than 200 – we dropped Ned Eckersley, who went on to get a hundred, twice and missed two run-outs against him too.

He was also caught down the leg-side, but it wasn’t given out, so luck was certainly on his side that day!

Sammy (Thilan Samaraweera) played his best innings for the club to make 144 not out and he had a great partnership with Tom Fell as we took a lead of around 60-odd on their first innings. We should have put ourselves more than 100 in front, though, and really put them under pressure.

In those small run-chases for victory, it is always important to make a good start and we put on 62 before I was out, then Matt Pardoe and Moeen Ali were able to bat aggressively and take us to an important nine-wicket win.

Pards is probably our third highest run-scorer in four-day cricket this season and has kicked on with his game.

He has definitely started to come of age as a cricketer, although he would probably have liked to have scored more hundreds this term – wouldn’t we all!