I THINK it was a missed opportunity not to beat Gloucestershire but we can take a lot of positives from the game.

I spoke to Paul Grayson and he said we played well but could not finish them off when the wicket became flatter.

He felt if I’d have played then we would have probably have won, but that’s neither here nor there and it was a good team performance from us.

It was very frustrating for me not to play because of a neck problem, and if I’d just had two more days to rest then I would have been okay.

So that’s a shame, but I’m fit and ready now.

And with Northants beating Glamorgan, it certainly would have been a very timely win for us, so it was a bit of a missed opportunity.

Northants are not dropping many points at the moment so there’s not much margin for error.

What we will need to do now is pick up the wins and take as many batting and bowling points as we can, and to do that we will need to play well on result wickets.

I think it’s fair to say it’s been batter’s year with lots of runs scored, so to pick up results and bonus points has been tough.

But with Monty Panesar in our side now hopefully we can win a few tosses and bowl a few teams out.

We have not won many tosses this season and that has not been helpful.

I think if we’d bowled first against Gloucestershire we’d have knocked them over for 150, and that would have been decisive.

But we can take a lot of positives from it because we played well and were only four wickets short.

I think to have a chance of promotion we need to win three out of our last four games and we are certainly capable of that, in fact we are capable of winning all four.

But we’ll just be giving it our all because we’ve played some good cricket this year and some stuff to be proud of, so hopefully we can top it off with promotion.

FULL COLUMN IN WEDNESDAY'S ECHO