McMillan stays positive on the task ahead

Craig McMillan has dismissed fears over his disappointing form on the tour of England so far. Two failures in the seven-wicket defeat at Lord's, as well as a duck and 12 in the warm-up game at Kent, hasn't done his confidence much good, but he insisted he is in the right frame of mind to get back in the runs.

Talking yesterday at Grace Road, where the New Zealanders are playing Leicestershire, McMillan said, "It was a disappointing Test from my point of view, but I've had those before and bounced back so I'm not going to go searching." He continued, "I felt fine. You can miss out in two knocks easily and it's not the end of the world. It's important to stay positive and not change too much, because then things can fall apart.

"It's simple, I missed a straight one then got a little bottom edge. You can over analyse about why those things happened and get down on yourself, but that's not doing anyone any good."

McMillan was out lbw to Matthew Hoggard in the first innings, and then played a loose sweep shot to Ashley Giles to be caught by Nasser Hussain second ball. At the stage of the match, it wasn't the most sensible choice of shot.

McMillan, 27, averages over 40 in Tests, and he insisted the current match against Leicestershire was important to get him back in some sort of form for the second Test at Headingley next Thursday. "A few of us missed out and we didn't score the runs we wanted from our middle order. England did, and that's an area where they outshone us," he said. "It was a hurt dressing room to be honest. Rightly so, we were pretty confident at the start of the day and thinking 280 was going to be enough to put them under real pressure. We didn't put them under any real pressure at all. We didn't bowl as well as we would have liked."

However, McMillan refused to write off their chances in the rest of the series. "Quite often this team performs best when our backs are against the wall. I'm sure the guys will come out swinging, even though it's not an ideal position."