WE don’t have a match this week, but we have organised a t20 against Shropshire, which will be decent preparation for when the action starts for real in a couple of weeks.

We have a few Shropshire lads who have been a big part of our squad for the last couple of years, people like Jack Shantry and Joe Leach and they’ll both play for Shropshire this week.

That gives us an extra couple of spots to give lads a run-out in our side and I’m sure there will be some keen competition.

Jack and Mo Ali usually have a bit of banter in these games and I’m sure Shants will either go the distance or get Mo out pretty quickly — there won’t be any holds barred!

Northamptonshire are a good outfit and I thought they played very well when we went up there for our LV= County Championship Division Two game last week.

The pitch was a bit of a green-top and it was an important toss to win. We haven’t lost this season when I’ve won the toss and we haven’t won when I’ve lost it and that carried on at Northants.

I thought we did OK to get to 195 on a green pitch and obviously Mo played really well. He has been excpetional all year and was the only bloke who turned up for us at Northampton with the bat.

In the first session we were excellent and perhaps from there we should have got 220-250.

There were then a couple of critical moments in the game — we dropped Steven Crook when he was on four, which would have made them 130-odd-7, and that was a huge moment in the context of the game.

He played very well and counter-attacked to get a good 80 and put us on the back foot. Once we were 100 behind, it was always going to be difficult.

Aneesh Kapil dropped the catch, but he is a confident character and normally has decent hands, but we all drop them sometimes and it’s part of the game.

We play Netherlands in the Yorkshire Bank 40 at New Road on Sunday and they are a good outfit — the best of the three non-county sides in the competition.

They have some powerful hitters in the likes of Wesley Barresi and Tom Cooper, who played extremely well against us over in Rotterdam, while Stephan Myburgh at the top of the order is a very good player too.

Their bowling is probably their weaker suit and they’ve had a couple of injuries in that department, but they can pack a punch in the batting order.

In our YB40 group, Nottinghamshire have got a bit of a lead, but you have to keep going and take each game as it comes.

We’re still in the hunt, so we still have a chance to qualify and we’ll keep going hard at it.