IT HAS been another busy week with some pleasing individual performances, but unfortunately we didn’t get the team results we had hoped for.

Down in Bristol we lost most of the first day’s play and we were then asked to bat in difficult conditions.

After losing two early wickets, Key and Walker batted superbly each scoring classy hundreds.

'Walks' has been in really good form and followed his hundred with a good 50 in the second innings.

At the other end Key had been undone by a few good deliveries going into this game, but this time around he absorbed early pressure and went on to post a brilliant 164.

To get a result we needed to bowl them out cheaply enough to enforce the follow-on and although our bowlers struck to their task and did a pretty good job, the match fizzled out.

New signing Simon Cook was the pick of the bowlers with his first five-wicket haul in the championship for Kent.

Meanwhile, the squad players not in the first XI are having a really tough time of things at the moment.

I really do feel for them because they are desperate to get out in the middle, but had their two-day game with Sussex called off.

The bad weather won’t leave them alone but to their credit they have worked hard and shown plenty of enthusiasm.

It was good to see my old mate Allan Donald at Edgbaston and I’m pleased to report he’s looking as fit as ever and working hard on reducing his golf handicap.

Allan is crazy about South African rugby and took great pleasure in telling me how poorly my team, the Natal Sharks, are performing right now.

The match against Warwickshire was, as expected, a tough competitive affair.

They have a team with plenty of all-rounders and a brilliant fielding unit headed up by Trevor Penny, who certainly sets the tone in that department.

We, on the other hand were, not at our best in the field and Nick Knight played superbly.

We need to focus on our work in the field and everybody in the squad is paying big attention to this area of our game.

I was impressed with our run chase but, in a big chase like that, you do need a bit of luck yet in this instance it didn’t run our way.

A couple of blinding catches reduced us to 30 for three but we fought our way back into the match and at 180 for four we were in with a good chance.

Van Jaarsveld, Fulton and Stevens all played classy one-day knocks, but unfortunately we lost our way toward the end and fell 19 short.

Again, there were some positives from the match and I do feel this team is capable of winning tight one-day fixtures, but we returned home to Canterbury very disappointed as we really felt we could have pulled this one off.

Finally, Andrew Hall seems to be having a good holiday in the Caribbean, and hasn’t played much for South Africa on the current tour.

We certainly could have done with him at Kent these past weeks, but hopefully this rest from the game will mean he arrives here full of energy and hungry for success.

We hope he gets some cricket in the one-day series to sharpen up his game before joining us around May 18.