Watching the start of the Open Championship this week I must admit I was tempted to pack up cricket and take up golf.

Nothing to do with the glamour of competing in big tournaments against great players of course, I'm nowhere near good enough for that.

It's just that in golf the ball moves away from you, not towards you, which tends to be the case in cricket. And right now, I seem to be having trouble with the cricket ball coming towards me.

As you can imagine my current form with the bat is causing me no end of frustration. To be honest, in all the time I've played county cricket I can't remember feeling so short of confidence as I did after my first innings nought up at Leicester this week.

There have been times in my career, both with Sussex and before that Derbyshire, when I have had a run of poor scores. Every player, no matter how good they are, goes through such sequences when they can't buy a run.

We are having a great season and I am getting a real buzz out of captaining a fantastic group of players who are working their nuts off to try and bring some success to Sussex.

But, as you can imagine, I desperately want to make more of a contribution myself.

The thing is, I have been scoring quite well in the one-day matches but something hasn't felt right all summer.

Perhaps it's a mental thing. In the first innings at Arundel last week I got to 20 odd, felt good, and then played a poor shot and was caught at the wicket.

Those are the ones that really hurt, when you do the hard work of actually getting in and feel reasonably comfortable and then you pass up the opportunity of a big score.

Within ten minutes of getting out on Wednesday I was back in the nets at Grace Road with our director of cricket Peter Moores and, 45 minutes later, I felt a whole lot better.

I decided it was time to go back to basics, to stand still and let the ball come on to the bat and trust in the technique which, to be fair, has stood me in pretty good stead over the last 15 years or so.

It seemed to work. In that net session I haven't hit the ball better all season, a point which Peter was quick to acknowledge afterwards.

I hope it is the turning point. Believe me, if the side wasn't doing well I would feel a hundred times worse. I'm getting so much satisfaction from the way we are playing at the moment but I've always been a positive person and feel it's a case of when rather than if I come out of this slump in form.

I've set myself the target of scoring three hundreds before the end of the season.

Some people will feel as captain that it's the least I should be doing, others will no doubt wish me good luck.

But it's a makeable target and the good thing as far as the team is concerned is that I can only add to what we've achieved with the bat this season.

There was a time, and it wasn't that long ago, when selectors inevitably picked a player who was enjoying a purple patch in county cricket to make an unlikely Test appearance.

If the same thought processes were applied this week by the selectors the names of Kent's Ed Smith and our own Tony Cottey would figure in their deliberations.

It won't happen of course, but when I told Cotts at Leicester this week that David Graveney would soon be on the phone I was only half-joking.

Tony has had some very tough years at Sussex but I thought last season we were starting to see the best of him and now he is showing the form that I knew he was capable of when I brought him to the county from Glamorgan back in 1999.

A lot of people lost faith in his ability at the club, and I'm not just talking about some of our supporters and members.

I think Cotts will be pleased he has repaid the faith both I and Peter Moores have shown in him and he will no doubt be feeling a quiet sense of satisfaction that he has silenced those people who doubted his ability.

Saturday July 19