IT is sad to see our New Road ground hit by the flooding, especially after the amount of effort that has gone in by so many people to get it ready for the start of the season.

It’s our home and we don’t want to be playing games at Kidderminster — we want to be at New Road — and it also makes life tough when we can’t use our practice facilities.

During the summer floods of 2007, we found it very difficult to find practice facilities and that was the case before our LV= County Championship Division One game with Middlesex at Lord’s.

We were hardly able to practice at all before that game and only managed to call in at Radley College in Oxfordshire to have a few throw-downs on the way down to London for the game.

Now the flood water at New Road has started to recede, we can get back to playing there as soon as possible after our four-day game with Surrey that has been moved to Kidderminster.

Our head groundsman Tim Packwood and his team do an amazing job — certainly one I wouldn’t want to do — and when we were at Surrey the other day, who have three or four times the number of groundstaff, it took them a lot longer to get us back out on the field.

Kidderminster is a good club ground and the wicket there is generally good, which is the main thing, and we are more used to playing there than other teams.

I’m sure Surrey, with Kevin Pietersen coming back from the IPL, won’t be too used to those kind of surroundings.

Although they will probably have KP back, to us he is just another batter and it only takes one ball to get them out — it was the same when we played against Andrew Strauss for Middlesex last week.

With the game being played at Kidderminster, they might throw a homecoming party for Steve Davies too!

It was good to catch up with him at the Oval recently and he has been playing well, but hopefully we can nick him off early on.

I’m getting a bit fed up of talking about Alan Richardson, but it is all people seem to ask me about and he was fantastic again in our match with Middlesex. He had a small injury scare in the Notts match at New Road, but our physio did a great job to get him fit and he was among the wickets once again at Lord’s.

We are set to start our CB40 campaign today when we play the Netherlands at Kidderminster and we are looking forward to the change of focus.

It is a competition we were poor in last season and we weren’t happy with our performance, but hopefully we can improve this time around and try to reach the semi-finals.

We have gone for a slight change of tactic in this competition this year because we have Michael Klinger available as our overseas player — he will bat at number three behind our two regular openers, Moeen Ali and Vikram Solanki.

Then, James Cameron will come in at four with me at five — it suits me to bat in the middle-order in one-day cricket.