WE will be taking on the touring Australian team this week — it is a great game for the club to have and financially it will be a good thing for New Road.

For the players, as a professional you always want to test yourself against the best, so up against an international team this week we will be able to see how good we are.

Phil Hughes came with us on the team coach to Bristol on Sunday to watch our Friends Life t20 game against Gloucestershire, so it was good to be able to catch up with him again and he said the Aussies are all looking forward to this game.

There are a few players in their squad who have played plenty of county cricket, such as Chris Rogers and Ed Cowan, as well as their coaches Michael di Venuto and Darren Lehmann.

There will be no points on offer in this game, so the pressure is off a little bit and we will always be the underdogs against an international side, but hopefully we will be able to showcase our skills.

It will be a bit of a strange situation having Nick Compton in our side, but I know him reasonably well having played against him a number of times.

It will be good to have a Test match opening batsman in our side and hopefully our younger players can pick up a few things from watching the way he goes about his game.

The South Africa tour match last season was a real launchpad for Chris Russell’s career and hopefully this game will give someone else the confidence and momentum to do well for the rest of the season.

You can’t replace Alan Richardson, but in Charlie Morris, who has been named in our side to play Australia, we have a bowler of a similar style. He has done well in first class cricket for Oxford University against the county sides.

I have not played in the same team as him before, so I am looking forward to it.

All the reports I’ve heard on him, particularly from our bowling coach Matt Mason, have been very positive.

Unfortunately, we have made a poor start to this year’s t20.

We have struggled with the ball to get our slower deliveries and yorkers right, but we haven’t been helped by missing the likes of Alan Richardson, Dave Lucas and Brett D’Oliveira with injuries.

Also, we have set ourselves high standards in the field this year, but we have not quite lived up to them in the t20 so far.

In Sunday’s loss at Gloucestershire, our former overseas player Mike Klinger played fantastically well to score a chanceless hundred, which is pretty rare in t20 cricket.

However, there is a long way to go in the competition and we qualified for the quarter-finals with 11 points last year and that is not out of our reach with eight games still to be played.

We need to get that first win, put some momentum behind us and go on a winning run like we did last year.