Alan Richardson is looking for Worcestershire to “reset” and continue the form shown in red ball cricket during the first part of the season when they resume LV=Insurance County Championship action against Durham at the Seat Unique Riverside on Sunday.
The Assistant Coach acknowledges that a return to four-day cricket has come at the ideal time after a disappointing start to the campaign in the Vitality Blast.
Worcestershire are lying in third spot in Division Two and within touching distance of Middlesex and Nottinghamshire after winning two, losing one and drawing three of the opening six matches.
Richardson said: “Has a four day game come at a good time? I think so. The schedule never lets up, and we knew from the start of the season that we would have a rush of games in red ball cricket, then into white ball stuff, and then to try and combine both formats.
“It’s an opportunity for us to reset a little bit, go away to Durham, try and put in four good days of performances in to give ourselves a chance to win that game.
“We’ve been really happy with our four-day form and performed far better in that so far than the one-day stuff.
“We have done the basics really well; we have to believe that we can continue to do that over a long period of time.
“You have to do some really good stuff for as long as you can, and I think we’ve done that pretty well this year. We have to believe that we can continue to do that.
“We’ve had some tough games, and we’ve stood up really well in those. It was really disappointing we didn’t beat Leicestershire away in the first game of the season after losing a little bit of time there.
“In general, we have been really happy. There is a blueprint we want to play our cricket too in the red ball format, and we’ve done that so far
“To put good performances in during that first block of six games was really important for us.
“It gives us something to keep focusing on in the red ball game to try and give ourselves a chance to be right in the mix when it comes to the last month of the season.”
The Rapids went down by 39 runs to Derbyshire Falcons in the Vitality Blast at New Road, and Richardson said: “It is a very quiet changing room at the moment, and the boys are obviously gutted.
“We strung together a little bit of a performance but not good enough over the 40 overs to give ourselves a chance to win.
“It is becoming a bit of a trend, so we have to buck ourselves up, come back again and keep working as hard as we can.
“The average score here is about 170, and the average winning score is about 190, so to keep Derbyshire to about 160, we did a pretty good job with the ball.
“In the field, we were excellent as always, we pride ourselves on that, and we gave ourselves a real sniff.
“Halfway through the batting performance, we were about 80-3, and you hope you’ve laid yourselves a platform to give yourselves a chance to win the game.
“For us to win some games of cricket, we have to do the basics really well, and at the moment, we are not doing them well enough.
“The guys are not hiding away from that. They know that, and we are going to have to keep working really hard, keep as much belief and confidence as we can.
“It is a tough sport. In four-day cricket, you can be behind the eight-ball for a long time, and it’s a slow death.
“In the T20 cricket, it can be pretty brutal, as we saw yesterday, where you know that you are not going to win the game from a little way out, and it’s hard to keep battling through that.
“We need to continue to try really hard, try and enjoy it and have as much belief and confidence as we can going into the last half of these games.”
