WE wanted to try and finish our season on a high note but unfortunately, it was all a bit ‘after the Lord Mayor’s show’ against Oxfordshire this week.

After the last game (against Herefordshire), where we played quite well, we weren’t at the races at all and had a really disappointing few days.

The lads knew that it was a bit of a dead rubber for us and Oxfordshire were out to try and win the championship but they pushed us aside too easily and to end that way, losing by a whole innings, wasn’t good for us.

I said to the players that we’ve got to have pride in all our performances and there were a lot of people who had come to watch a game of cricket on the Monday, so I sent them out to go and face up to that.

We’ve won two games, lost two games and drawn two games this season, so we’ve been very inconsistent – there have been massive ups and massive downs, and the Oxfordshire game was one of the downs.

We have struggled to bat our first innings through most of the season and that’s one of the big reasons why our results have been inconsistent.

If we’d managed to get one more win, that maybe would have got us into the top three or four, which wouldn’t have been too bad.

Our aim was to try and challenge again after winning the title last year but it wasn’t to be.

But our aim is to push on and hopefully we’ve got the message out to the other counties that we’re not the same Wiltshire from years gone by that were whipping boys.

The fact that the lads were distraught after the Oxfordshire game shows that.

We’ll regroup now and look to see what we can improve on going forward.

The league season will be finishing soon and I always like to see Wiltshire teams doing well in the WEPL (West of England Premier League).

It’s a really important season because of the restructuring that’s going to happen and it looks like we’re going to have two teams in Premier One with Potterne going up, which is great.

Trowbridge and Chippenham are other teams that could win their leagues and that’s great to see.

Local teams doing well is integral to Wiltshire doing well and getting stronger in the future.