Ollie Rayner

Considering we’ve been trying to get out of the Twenty20 mentality, it wasn’t ideal to be playing shortened 40-over games because of the weather last week.

We were really up against it in the game at Old Trafford – nothing went our way – but we got the better of the conditions at Essex and followed that up with another good performance against Gloucestershire.

Our batting seems to be coming good at just the right time. When you’ve got Stirling and Morgan back there in the hutch without even getting their pads on, something must be going right!

There’s no denying it, when Buck’s in form he has a huge impact on the rest of the team. Dawid Malan has been a bit inconsistent in Twenty20, but now he’s come into a great vein of form as well.

When you’ve got a pairing like that, it gives everyone confidence in what’s going on around them. I’ve said it before, but I felt there was a real turnaround in our batting when we played at Liverpool earlier in the season and we’ve carried on from there.

We’re making a late surge in the CB40 and the group’s fairly open. The only thing we can do is win the games we’ve got left and see what happens.

Now it’s back to the County Championship at Durham, who are having a difficult time and I am a bit surprised that they’ve underachieved this season, to be honest.

In the past they’ve been a bit spoilt for choice, especially with bowlers like Steve Harmison, Liam Plunkett and Graham Onions.

Michael Di Venuto’s been one of the top batsmen on the county scene for a while. Then they’ve got younger players who are in England’s minds, people like Ben Stokes and Scott Borthwick.

So I don’t think you can count them out of it, but we’re concentrating our efforts on winning rather than not losing. We’re in a good place at the moment and our glass is half-full rather than half-empty.