WE STARTED our Unicorns Knockout Trophy campaign by beating Hertfordshire on Sunday and it’s always nice to open the season with a win.

A couple of years ago when we did well in all formats we had a particularly good start and that always builds a bit of confidence and has the team heading in the right direction early.

From that perspective it was good and performance-wise there were elements I was happy with but there were also some diabolical bits of cricket and I gave the guys a bit of a rocket after the game. Hopefully they can take that on board and build on that moving forwards.

It is expected that we will be a little bit rusty early on in the season but some of the shots they played that were rash.

We always want to be positive but some of the shots were reckless and we need to get that out of the game. We need to be thinking more of the team and where we are in a particular position in the game.

We got off to a great start at about 90-1 off 10 overs and that was a time to build but we lost wickets and the middle order just capitulated, other than Ed Young.

It was left to the captain, Michael Coles, to bring the guys through. He batted extremely well to get us anywhere near a respectable score.

We did not bat our 50 overs, which is criminal. We batted 36 and prevented ourselves scoring off 14 overs. There’s a lot of balls there and a lot of runs too.

We have got to look at as it’s something we fell foul of last year when we didn’t bat our overs a couple of times and that eventually cost us net run-rate is what we went out on last year.

We should have posted a bigger score but we bowled and fielded particularly well to get the win in the end.

It’s not all doom and gloom because we have won three out of three this summer and there is room for improvement.