It’s fair to say it’s been a testing opening two weeks of the season for everyone at Warwickshire but one thing I can promise is that we will come out fighting.
Anytime you lose heavily hurts badly so you can imagine the dressing room was pretty down after the Yorkshire defeat at Edgbaston last weekend. It certainly wasn’t a very happy Easter.
There has been a lot of hard thinking and talking this week and we have to go again when Surrey visit Edgbaston, starting tomorrow.
I’m a great believer that you find out most about sportspeople with how they react when the going is tough.
I’m so determined that everyone is fired up and ready to perform as we know we can this weekend. We are desperate to hit the performance levels everyone involved with Warwickshire expects and deserves.
Ian Bell
It’s pretty easy to perform when you are on the crest of a wave and everything is going with you but the challenge is to do it when the chips are down.
I’ve been fortunate to win a lot of Test Match series with England but have also been on the end of two 5-0 defeats in Australia and watching how people react in that scenario is very interesting.
That’s why I’m so determined that everyone is fired up and ready to perform as we know we can this weekend. We are desperate to hit the performance levels everyone involved with Warwickshire expects and deserves.
We have had criticism over the past two weeks and rightly so. Last September we were at Lord’s lifting the Royal London One-Day Cup and receiving plenty of adulation.
If you are happy doing that then you also have to be prepared to cop the flak when things aren’t going well and the last fortnight has certainly fallen into that category.
That said, this is not the time for panic stations and we are lucky to have someone like Ashley Giles, who has been there and seen it all before, as part of our backroom team.
Ashley, Jim Troughton and myself are having lots of conversations this week trying to get the right formula.
It’s fair to say none of us saw this start to the season coming. We prepared well and were looking forward to hitting the ground running but it hasn’t happened.
You have to give credit to Surrey and Yorkshire for the way they have performed in our two matches so far but, at the same time, we know we haven’t executed our skills well enough with either bat or ball.
Today will be the second of two very hard days training we will be doing to get ready for Friday and then it’s a case of people standing up to be counted.
We have yet to decide on a team but it would be foolish not to at least give some thought to a change or two after the first couple of games.
This time last year we had got off to a flying start and then fell away so we know things can turn around very quickly.
I still believe there is more than enough ability in this squad to win matches regularly and put us in a position where we can challenge for at least one trophy later in the season.
But we have to prove that on the pitch, starting tomorrow.
