WE’VE been pretty poor all-round in two games against Middlesex recently, so it’s not been a good week for us at Hampshire.

By the time you read this, our four-day game against them at Merchant Taylors’ School will be over and I don’t think that the rain will have saved us.

If we’ve managed to get a draw, then it would have been an unbelievable effort but we don’t deserve that at all because of how poorly we’ve played.

We’ve been completely out-bowled by them and on a wicket that was very bowler-friendly, we should never have let them get to 470-3 on the first day – that just shouldn’t have happened.

We also had a disappointing (66-run) T20 defeat against them last Friday night and that was another one that we didn’t play well in.

But personally, I felt like I had quite a good game myself.

I scored a good 46 and also took a wicket, so I played some good cricket and had something to be happy about.

It was good to get a chance to play some white-ball cricket and from now on, we’ve got a period of three weeks where we get to concentrate on that.

We don’t play in the County Championship again until June 26 and we’ve got plenty of T20 games to look forward to, as well as the start of the 50-over competition.

I really enjoy white-ball cricket and I think that a lot of other players do as well.

Our training and preparation doesn’t change too much but the intensity of it probably does go up to try and mirror what the games are like.

I know that the batsmen enjoy the stuff that we do now because we’ll get the chance to do a bit of range-finding to see how far we can hit the ball and things like that.

We play Kent today and Glamorgan on Friday, and then our first game in the one-day cup is against Essex on Sunday.

I’m really excited about having the chance to try and score some runs and take some wickets in the next few weeks, and I know that everyone at Hampshire is looking forward to it too because we’ve been a very good side in white-ball cricket over the last few years.