Chris Nash has urged Sussex to grasp the initiative as they bid for an elusive victory at Derbyshire.

The county have been instantly put on the back foot in two of their three County Championship games this season after making disastrous starts against Northamptonshire and Leicestershire.

Northants were well placed on 296-2 after the opening day of the season at Wantage Road while Sussex crashed to 163 all out before Leicestershire reached 140-2 at stumps on day one at Hove last week.

Sussex ended up salvaging both games – with help from the weather against Northants – to make it three draws out of three in division two so far and extend their miserable run to just one win in their last 21 games in all formats.

They travel to Derbyshire tomorrow aiming to belatedly kickstart their season with in-form opening batsman Nash admitting that they cannot afford another slow start.

Nash, who has made two centuries already this season, said: “We are a good team and have got good players but I just think we have got to get ourselves performing right for the full four days.

“I can’t put my finger on why we haven’t started games well this season but we have got to make sure we get ourselves going. We could have nailed Essex on day one but in the other two games it wasn’t good enough so we need to sort out our performances on days one and two.”

Sussex will be without injured skipper Luke Wright once again so Ben Brown leads a side missing England all-rounder Chris Jordan who is at the IPL.

Seamer Ajmal Shahzad is a doubt after suffering a side strain against Leicestershire so Lewis Hatchett and Stuart Whittingham are on standby. All-rounder Harry Finch could also feature after a century for the 2nd XI last week but leg-spinner Will Beer drops out of the squad.

Squad: Briggs, Brown, Finch, Garton, Hatchett, Joyce, Machan, Magoffin, Nash, Robinson, Shahzad, Taylor, Wells, Whittingham.