MICHAEL Coles wasn’t fit for our Knockout Trophy quarter-final at Dorset on Sunday. He came to see me on Monday for a chat and to tell me that he’s going to have to step away from playing in the three-day game.

He struggles with niggles and knocks a lot and when he plays for his club on a Saturday, he ends up playing for four days and that takes its toll.

Mike has played a lot of games and picked up more than 50 caps for the county, so he’s been an important part of our side for a long time.

It’s a shame that he’ll have to step down but he still wants to be involved in the one-day format. This weekend’s game against Cornwall at Corsham is going to be his last three-day match.

Ed Young is the vice-captain and he stepped in and did the duties against Dorset last weekend, so I imagine that he’ll take over for the time being but we’ll probably have a discussion about it this weekend – the committee may need to get together and decide who’s going to be our next captain.

After that quarter-final game in Dorset, the players had their heads in their hands in the dressing room. They were so upset.

The weather reports that we’d had were correct and midway through the day, we had a break of two or three hours due to rain and we just couldn’t get back out there.

We were pretty happy to have Dorset at 168-4 with 16 overs to go but then we had a revised target of 222 set through the Duckworth-Lewis method.

It’s a system that’s considered fair and the best way of getting a result from a rain-reduced game, but we came out on the wrong end of it a bit – 223 from 34 overs was quite tricky, even though Steve Bullen and Ed Young batted superbly.

Jake Roberts keeps his place against Cornwall this weekend and we’ve also brought Jayden Levitt back in, meaning that with the likes of him and Steve Bullen, we’ve got some experienced batsmen in our line-up.