WE were bitterly disappointed with our Friends Life t20 defeat against Northamptonshire at New Road on Sunday.

We now have four more t20s coming up — starting with tonight’s trip to Glamorgan — and it’s a case of going out to win every game.

If we do win all four, there is an outside chance of making the quarter-finals as that would take us to 12 points, which is one more than we got in qualifying last year.

Against Northants, Richard Levi took the game away from us and I thought he played very well, but we could have bowled better.

We dragged it back a little bit, but 138 on that very slow pitch was a pretty decent total. We chased it reasonably well, keeping wickets in hand, but we unfortunately came up five runs short.

Andre Russell nearly took me out with a powerful straight drive — thankfully it hit me on the thigh pad and not anywhere else! The way he hits the ball is immense and he nearly cleaned me up a few overs earlier too.

You have to stay on your toes batting with him and, if he hits it as hard as he can, there’s certainly no getting out of the way. He played well and struck the ball how some of us mere mortals can only dream of.

Our LV= County Championship game against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham was a bit of a horror-show.

There was a 10-minute period when we lost six wickets for four runs and, afterwards, it was very difficult to come back from that.

It didn’t seam around a lot, it just bounced a little bit from time to time and it was one of those days when instead of people playing and missing, everything caught the outside edge.

Moeen played on off the inside edge, so we had five nicks and a chop-on in the space of four or five overs. It is obviously frustrating and disappointing, but looking back at the dismissals, there wasn’t a lot that the lads did wrong — they were all defending.

Maybe in hindsight we could have played the conditions a bit better and left on length more, but that is very difficult to do when our nets at New Road and the pitches we generally play on don’t bounce like that pitch did.

It is very difficult to start leaving the ball on length when you can’t do that for the rest of the year.

After that first hour, I thought we were very good.

The partnership between Gareth Andrew and Joe Leach got us up to some sort of score, which gave us an outside chance in the game.

Obviously, 182 was way below par, but from 22-6 it was a pretty good effort.

I thought we bowled pretty well, but we started poorly on the first evening.

That gave them a bit of a start, but we came back the next day and bowled fantastically to take the 10 wickets for around 220 runs, which was pleasing.

We then batted well in the second innings and Joe was absolutely outstanding in both innings and we were really pleased with him.

He’s put a hell of a lot of hard work in and has really come of age as a cricketer.

Also, a couple of decisions didn’t go our way either. There was a big stand between Joe and Sammy (Thilan Samaraweera) and Sammy was playing as well as I’ve seen him play this year, but he fell to a terrible lbw decision. Then Ben Cox was given out off his hip and we had to fightback again to make them chase 190.

They got off to a bit of a flier though, which made life difficult from then onwards.