I HAVE to say that in all my time as the manager of the three-day Championship side, I can’t remember a game where we’ve won every single session.

We managed to do that against Dorset this week.

It was a really professional performance and it was as good as the way we played last season – in fact, I’d say it was probably better than some of those performances.

There were some great contributions from players new to the squad. Mikey Reynolds was only called up on Saturday night after Tahir Afridi pulled out with another injury but he had a great knock on debut and looked really composed and experienced.

If you look at the team from the start of the season, we had five opening batsmen missing – Henry Langford has retired, Tom Morton is unavailable for the three-day games and there was no Ed Kilbee, Steve Bullen and Jayden Levitt either.

Mikey was called up as an all-rounder but the wicket was a flat one that didn’t favour the seamers and we really exploited Dorset’s young side with the spin of Joe King.

Josh Reid was another new face in the squad. He’s only played two or three games for Corsham but he was part of the squad and he contributed to the win too.

Ed Young’s knock in the first innings was superb and the scores from him and Mikey got us on our way. It was important that we batted well at the start of our second innings and Luke De Souza and Uzi Qureshi put on a partnership of 100 for our first wicket.

We still had to bowl them out to get the win but we set ourselves a target of three wickets a session to get the job done – we got three in the first session and four in the second.

It’s a good start to the Championship for us and our next game is against Berkshire (on June 21).

They were down near the bottom of the table last season but they won this week (a 40-run triumph over Oxfordshire), so I think they may be a different proposition this year.

Looking at their side, it looks like they’ve brought back a few old faces into the team but we’ve got to be confident of winning any game at Corsham.

If we can make it two from two, it will have been a very good start to the three-day season for us.