Northamptonshire captain Alex Wakely admitted that his side’s batting let them down in their 83-run defeat to Nottinghamshire in the opening Yorkshire Bank 40 game of the season.
Wakely, making his debut as a permanent fixture in the captaincy position after being appointed in ther winter, watched his charges throw away a decent start as they collapsed from 59-0 to 76-6 in pursuit of the visitors’ 287-4 and he knows that higher standards will have to be attained in future outings.
He said: “We let ourselves down with the bat. It was a very flat pitch and the extra fielder in the ring made it harder with the ball.
“I thought we could get there with the bat but a few rash shots and wickets tumbling meant that we didn’t get any partnerships going.
“We’ve got a week now where we can try to rectify it before we play Sussex.”
Much has been made of the fact that the County have made it a priority to drastically improve on their limited overs output but for all the rhetoric, it didn’t manifest itself on the field, as Wakely acknowledged.
He added: “We’ve done a lot of preparation over the winter and a lot of talking about everything that we wanted to try and put into place but today we didn’t really do it. “We saw snippets of improvement but we were beaten by a better team in all aspects.
“We dropped five catches and if you drop good players then you’re made to pay and we were slightly off the pace in the field and that goes into your batting and that’ll have to be something that we look at.