OUR chances of promotion from Division Two of the LV=County Championship have now gone, which is disappointing, but we still have two games left to play, starting with Hampshire at New Road tomorrow.

This season has been tough at times and we have to learn from our mistakes, but we have made too many and they have been repeated too often.

We have a young side, but there are also plenty of players who have played a lot of cricket and, if I’m being honest, I would have expected a lot more from us this season.

We want to end the season on a high by winning both of our remaining four-day games and will be aiming for a third-placed finish in the table.

Hampshire will be disappointed with how their campaign has gone — before the season began they would have been hot favourites alongside Lancashire for promotion.

They have massively under-achieved by their standards this term, but they still gave us a heavy beating when we played them at the Rose Bowl earlier in the year and, like us, they will be desperate to finish the season as stongly as possible.

Their batting, in particular, is strong with the likes of Jimmy Adams, James Vince, Sean Ervine and Neil McKenzie, but they will be without Michael Carberry, who is with the England squad.

Added to that, David Balcombe and James Tomlinson are both good bowlers and they both performed well against us at the Rose Bowl.

The game will be a chance for our younger players to play in two more first-class games, but we are all professional cricketers who are proud of our performances and career stats, so that will be all the motivation we will need.

This year we have been far too inconsistent — we have shown in all competitions that we are capable of beating the big sides and have picked up some impressive wins both at New Road and away from home.

However, as well as these highs, there have been a lot of lows too with some pretty ordinary performances along the way. The art of being a good team is being consistent, which is why the top players are always near the top of the averages — they perform week in, week out.

Our defeat to Essex last week was bitterly disappointing and was quite similar to our loss to Gloucestershire. In both games the toss was a crucial one to win, but we wasted them and didn’t go on to take advantage with decent first innings scores.

Down at Chelmsford, given how much the pitch turned later on in the game, we would have been strong favourites to win if we could have set them anything around 200, especially with Moeen Ali and Shaaiq Choudhry in our side. The manner of our dismissals during the game is what was most disappointing.