Geared up to play hard cricket

Coming out of the last Test match at Old Trafford, although we lost, there were a lot of positives that we could take from that match.

All the bowlers bowled well. I have to single out Darren Sammy for his excellent seven-wicket haul in the second innings of his debut Test. It was a remarkable performance. He did the job Daren Ganga, the captain, asked him to do which was to contain the English batsmen. And with him getting the ball to do a bit off the pitch, he was rewarded with a heap of wickets.

Shiv (Chanderpaul) played a sensational innings and he was supported by most of the other batsmen, especially Runako (Morton). It was unfortunate that none of the batsmen batted around Shiv and Runako and went on to get bigger scores so that we could have won the game.

There were obviously areas where we faltered. We have reviewed our performance and know where we made our mistakes and in the future we are working on being more aware of those situations to overcome them.

If we had been a little more disciplined in the bowling department in the first innings of that Old Trafford Test we could have gotten England out for a smaller score. We gave away too many extras. 320 would have made a big difference rather than 370.

Although we lost, all the batsmen showed that we were willing to spend time at the crease and bat for long periods to try to win the game even on the fourth and fifth days.

England had the advantage of having a spinner bowling well on the last day on a pitch where there was a lot of rough on both sides for both the right- and left-hand batsman. Our main threat was Monty (Panesar) bowling in the rough to our batsmen. He caused some problems for us and he won the game for England by picking up most of the wickets in the second innings.

There is not much to report on the first day of the final Test here in Durham because it has been rained out and it is now a four day Test match. With the various forecasts we are expecting more bad weather in the coming days.

We did go to the ground today for a look around and after lunch we had a training session at the Newcastle Indoor Cricket facility at the South Northumberland Cricket Club. The guys are still keen on going out there and putting in a 100% effort. We are focused on trying to pull the series back 2-1 and we need to play four days of hard cricket.