OUR six-wicket LV= County Championship Division One defeat up at Durham was a tough one to take and the batters certainly let us down in both innings.

In the first innings, we were unlucky with the toss and I would definitely have stuck Durham in if I’d won it. They put the ball in the right areas and it did plenty — it wasn’t really a question of poor shot selection as a lot of the wickets fell to forward defensive shots.

However, in the second innings after the opening partnership between myself and Phil Hughes, we threw far too many wickets away with poor execution. We got to about 30 runs ahead for no loss, then lost out next 10 wickets for not much more than a hundred.

After that, the new ball was key for us and Alan Richardson got us off to a great start with three early wickets, but if you could want any batsmen on your side in that situation, Paul Collingwood and Dale Benkenstein would be pretty high on everyone’s list.

Durham are out of our reach now after four wins on the bounce and we can take consolation from the fact they’ve put that run together. We’ve still got three four-day games left this season and if we can win a couple of them, we can still escape relegation — there is plenty to play for.

Over the course of the year, Bumpy (Steve Rhodes ) and I have tried everything — the softly-softly approach with an arm around peoples’ shoulder right through to reading them the riot act — but nothing seems to have worked.

Nobody wants to get out for low scores, we just need to bat a bit smarter than we have been.

We now have back-to-back home games and we generally produce result-wickets at New Road, so hopefully we’ll have some decent weather so that we can try and force two victories and keep our hopes alive.

We entertain Middlesex tomorrow (11am) and they have done pretty well this year after making a good start to the season after winning promotion last year.

However, their form has tailed off a bit recently and hopefully that could play into our hands and it is the right time to face them.

Before that game, we face Lancashire at New Road in our final Clydesdale Bank 40 game of the season; we are looking forward to it and hopefully we can end our one-day matches on a high.

We began our CB40 campaign with three wins in the first five or six games and that could have been even better if we hadn’t got on the wrong side of the Duckworth/Lewis system a couple of times. We then had a couple of narrow defeats to Leicestershire and the last-ball loss to them hit us hard and we still haven’t really recovered from that.

Finally, I’d just like to wish Jimmy Cameron all the best for the future after he announced his decision to retire from cricket — he is a fantastic guy to have in your dressing room and will be missed.

Jimmy played some fantastic innings for us — most notably the 90-odd he got against Lancashire to help us stay up and the big partnership he had with Moeen at Sussex the year before to get us promoted.