Hello again!

Sorry about the brief hiatus in the blog but things have been a little hectic down here. I've been doing a few things for my parents, among them installing and explaining how to use a new TV/DVD recorder. There's money to be made for anyone who can write a version of that process for people of a certain age. I ended up writing a four pager that covered most of what they need and hopefully they'll be fine from here. Then again, I could be trying to explain removing Scandinavian subtitles from 230 miles away...

There's also been family trips to Chatsworth, Matlock and Bakewell and the weather has meant there's been little chance for cricket. We'd hoped to go to Leek to see the Seconds, but the weather looked distinctly unfavourable and the fixture was abandoned after only six overs, so we missed little.

Today Derbyshire theoretically start a four-day Championship fixture against Northamptonshire, a game of fair importance, although the likelihood is that the game will be truncated by the weather. I'm convinced that we have a decent side that can match our hosts and that we are as capable of promotion as any of the others in the mix. What the team now has to do is ensure that their focus and level of intensity is there for every day of every match. This season we have beaten a fair spread of teams from division one, a sign that the ability is there. Conversely, we have lost to teams of only average ability from our own division, a sign perhaps that we have not always been as 'switched on' as we might have been.

Some of that is down to inexperience, but aside from a few bad days - and tell me a side that hasn't had those - this has been an encouraging season thus far. For me, a big plus has been that the batting has largely fired well without major input from an overseas star. In recent seasons, we only scored runs when Rogers, Katich or Di Venuto did well. This season, the runs have been evenly shared among the top seven, with neither overseas player really dominating. Ideally, of course, your top six fires AND your overseas player is still scoring shedloads, but Derbyshire have adopted a team approach to scoring runs - as it should be - and done so with success in all competitions.

Usman Khawaja and Martin Guptill were always likely to find English wickets a challenge, but both have worked hard and Guptill may well find August and September wickets more to his liking than those he has come across thus far. Having said that, he led from the front in the T20 and we now need him to translate obvious ability to weight of runs in the Championship and CB40.

If he does that and the others keep up their work we will not be too far away come season end. We will also need a little luck with injuries and can hopefully count on a few injured seamers being fit before long. A fit and firing Footitt would do us no harm, nor would a Groenewald. If Tony Palladino maintains his current form he is capable of forcing a promotion challenge, with assistance from the rest.

For today, I await the team with interest. Will Paul Borrington replace Dan Redfern, or will Matt Lineker come in? I'd play Bozza, dropping Madsen down the order to accommodate him.

Then again, I'm not Karl Krikken, so we'll see what he does later this morning.