WE have another busy schedule this week with two Royal London One-Day Cup matches and an important LV= County Championship Division One fixture against Nottinghamshire, starting at New Road on Friday.

The schedule hasn’t been too kind to us – we travel to play Surrey in a televised match at the Oval tomorrow, starting at 2pm. We will finish at around 10pm in London and then get back in the early hours before starting at 10.30am on Wednesday against Gloucestershire at New Road.

It will be a tough workload for the lads, but I suppose every County has manic periods.

Looking back at the start of our Royal London One-Day Cup campaign, the wash-out at Durham was disappointing, but we didn’t do ourselves justice in the defeats to Yorkshire and Somerset.

I don’t think we batted, bowled or fielded as well as we can do and there’s certainly room for a lot of improvement.

Against Somerset at Taunton, the toss was a good one for them to win – it was quite a dry pitch and gripped and spun a bit. It was probably better to bat first. Somerset posted 305-7 from their 50 overs – which I think was a shade over a par score.

I don’t think we bowled well at the death because Somerset scored 50-plus runs in the last few overs. We probably should have been chasing around 280, but we lost three quick wickets in our reply which made the run-chase difficult.

We need to get more of a foundation with the bat because we lost three wickets in seven overs at Taunton.

We have to find a way of getting better starts.

I thought Ed Barnard played very well at Taunton in his 51 from 41 balls. It was his first List-A half-century.

He’s a genuine all-rounder and has found himself batting eight or nine in the first team at the moment. Ed has scored centuries in our second team and is a genuine batter for England under-19s at number five. Hopefully, he will continue to score runs to move himself up the order.

We were eventually bowled out for 249 with 4.4 overs to go.

In the match against Yorkshire at New Road, I would have bowled first had I won the toss and I thought we beat the bat a lot. But we probably didn’t get the ball in the right areas enough in the first hour and we didn’t take the wickets we would have liked. That enabled Yorkshire to post 345-6. Glenn Maxwell’s 111 off 76 balls put the game out of reach. He’s someone who has been around the world playing white ball cricket.

He’s a World Cup winner. He probably hasn’t had the best time this summer, but he had to come off at some point and unfortunately it was against us.

In our reply, we had two run-outs in the top three which didn’t help and we lost a couple of early wickets which put the brakes on, and we were eventually bowled out for 212. Ross Whiteley hit 77 off 51 balls and showed what he is capable of doing.