WE put in a fantastic effort all-round in our eight-wicket NatWest T20 Blast victory over Birmingham Bears.

With the ball, we restricted them in the power-play and the middle of their innings, before Chris Russell bowled superbly well at the death, which kept them around 25 runs below par.

We then tried to take them down a bit in our batting power-play when the ball was coming onto the bat well and that worked pretty well.

It was pretty much game-over from there and Colin Munro came in and did fantastically well to finish it off.

Confidence is a massive thing and the guys are flying high at the moment – we don’t fear anyone and if you look down our team list, there are some pretty big names.

We have the likes of Saeed Ajmal and Moeen Ali, who isn’t with us at the moment, while Colin is an international cricketer too and these guys can all strike the ball out of the park, as can Ross Whiteley and Ben Cox down the order.

I’ve been in pretty good form too and we have a good side – we feel we can compete with anybody.

Chris has done really well this year and he is now the highest T20 wicket-taker in the country. It’s quite a simple plan really where we set very similar fields for his death overs and he has to go hard into the pitch and get the ball above waist height.

Using that, mixed in with his slower balls and his slower ball bouncers, we try to make batsmen hit to the big leg-side boundaries and it has worked pretty well so far.

Also, it was great to see New Road sold out for the Bears game – as a player, you want to play in front of packed grounds.

Being a local derby, we generally get a good crowd for that game, but with us winning and being on a bit of a roll, that brings people in too. They want to see good cricket and we are playing that at the moment.

Elsewhere, Moeen was absolutely outstanding to get his maiden Test hundred for England. I put the TV on at 11am to watch the first hour, he played fantastically well, got himself in and for him still to be there with two balls remaining in the day was a hell of an effort.

Obviously, we all know he’s class here at Worcester, but he has now proved that on the international stage too and that should hopefully set him up for a long Test career and he thoroughly deserves it.

Without even considering his bowling, he deserves to be in the England top-six just for his batting alone. After the game, I texted him to say we had nets on Thursday morning, but he didn’t turn up for that!