Everyone connected with the club was delighted for James Kirtley after his memorable Test debut at Trent Bridge earlier this week.

However, I can't say that I was surprised at how well James coped with the special demands of international cricket.

There isn't a more committed, driven cricketer in the country than James and while he obviously lacked Test experience you could tell from the way he performed that he had encountered surfaces similar to the one at Nottingham several times before in his career and knew exactly what he had to do to get the best out of it.

Suddenly his image is all over the back, and front, pages. I spoke to him on Tuesday and after congratulating him my first piece of advice to him was to switch off his mobile phone. Everyone is going to want a piece of the new England hero over the next few days and it would be easy in that situation to get sidetracked. I don't know if he took my advice, but I do know that nothing will deter him from his next target which is to make sure he is on the plane for the winter tours to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, hopefully armed with an ECB contract.

One or two so-called experts reckon James will struggle on flat pitches such as the Oval because he doesn't have that extra yard of pace selectors and even the coach, Duncan Fletcher, seem mildly obsessed with when they choose an England attack these days. All I would say to that is that James has taken 50 wickets or more for the past five seasons and they haven't all come on wickets such as Trent Bridge where the bounce is inconsistent or it's going sideways.

Finally on the subject of our new England player, I think Michael Vaughan deserves a lot of credit for actually picking him after Fletcher and Nasser Hussain ignored him for four Tests. His faith was justified and we all hope it's the start of a long international career for Ambi.

IT'S easy to say with hindsight, but I was always confident we had enough overs to bowl out Lancashire at Hove last Sunday and gain another vital win in our challenge for the Championship.

If we had lost that game I think our chances of overhauling Surrey would have disappeared so I wasn't going to give them a sniff of winning the match. Given the fact that they bat long and that the boundaries were short, we needed a big score on the board to give me the option of keeping attacking fields, especially for Mushtaq Ahmed.

Once we had opened up an end with the key wicket of Glenn Chapple I felt we would win the game. Mushy did the business again but without Billy Taylor's four wickets at the top of the innings we would have struggled. Once again, when we've needed it most, one of our players have come up with a brilliant individual performance.

And what more can be said about Mushy? He's a dream to captain because he doesn't mind what end he bowls at or when he bowls and once he has got the ball in his hand it is very hard to get it off him again! Performance-wise there hasn't been a better overseas player in our cricket this season, but you will also be hard pressed to find someone with a better attitude as well.

I put a phone call in to my old mate Phil DeFreitas this week, requesting that his Leicestershire side do us a favour and beat Surrey. If we won two and drew the other two of our remaining four games then I believe it would be enough to win the title. Believe me, if there is any pressure we are not feeling it. It's Surrey's to lose and we will be chasing them every step of the way.

Saturday August 23