It’s a shame Chris Gayle won’t be coming to Lord’s when we take on Somerset – in a way it would have been fun to play against him.

There’s no doubt he’s one of the most exciting batsmen in world cricket but, even without him, Somerset are a pretty good Twenty20 side and we’ll be expecting them to come at us pretty hard.

I think overall you’d say we’ve made a reasonable start in the tournament and we’ve got a base to build on but, with that said, when you look at our team, you’d say we can deliver a bit better.

At the moment we seem to be giving one fantastic performance followed by a below-par one and it’s clear we’ve got to find some consistency with a string of good performances.

Our last game against Surrey at The Oval was pretty disappointing – we had a great middle period in their innings but then we probably let it slip towards the end and allowed them to get a bigger total than we should have done.

We didn’t exactly cover ourselves in glory at the start of our innings either and in the end there was too much ground to make up. Frustrating – especially as I’ve no doubt we would have won the night before against Sussex, but for the rain!

Still, we had a good day at the annual Wormsley seven-a-side event this week – it was really relaxed, the cricket was fun and it was a chance for the players to branch out a bit.

Mingling with some of the corporate types gave us the opportunity for a bit of intellectual conversation, which is something we don’t often have in the Middlesex dressing-room.

It’ll be nice to get back to Lord’s and, after the Somerset game, we’re there again for the start of the County Championship match against Lancashire.

I think we’re all looking forward to getting back into the Championship – we’re happy with the way that’s gone so far and hopefully we can build on our good record at Lord’s.

Finally, we’re all absolutely gutted for Tom Helm after the news about his injury. He’s a quality fast bowler and he’d done so well after coming back into the team.

When I got injured at least it happened towards the end of the season, but it was still pretty tough to take. So it’s hard to comprehend what Tom’s going through but I wish him well and hope he’ll come back stronger.