'Should you find yourself wandering through Newcastle city centre, or perhaps if you use any form of North-East public transport, then you may just notice us, two of the most un-intimidating cricketers imaginable, staring at you smouldering with intent. Don’t be scared' © Durham CCC

Ottis Gibson is being sorely missed at the Riverside this year. A fairly simple statement you might think. The man was nothing short of talismanic last year. But while his presence was not only vital to our on-field results, as wickets came his way with considerable regularity, he also lent much-needed credibility to the club’s Twenty20 marketing campaign. That the campaign won an award for best advertising (forgive me for not knowing the actual name of such a prestigious acclaim) owes solely to Gibbo’s presence.

There was someone else who featured… someone who you may feel was equally as critical to its success, as his name was the cornerstone of the whole gimmick. At this point I will cease that most nauseating of habits – talking about myself in the third person – yes, Gibbo and I were the chosen ones. Those of you who have seen the film ‘Men in Black’ will know that it features one of many Will Smith’s that exist in this world.

So due to my penchant for favouring the moniker ‘Will’ to my full Christian name William, the fact that Gibbo has the aptitude for looking mean and moody (not to mention his innate coolness), and that for last year’s Twenty20 competition the Durham Dynamo’s wore black, all went hand in hand to create the fantastic opportunity for my good name to be sullied. I simply cannot do mean and moody like my multi-million pound namesake. Or, it seems, like Gibbo.

Nevertheless, the photo shoot was conducted, amid much shoddy sunglass-enhanced pouting and pseudo gun (for gun, read silver-painted cricket bat) waving. Interesting fact: the man charged with organizing this just so happened to be a good school friend of mine. He is now an ex-school friend.

So for this year’s Twenty20 campaign, one in which we as a club are determined to make successful on the pitch (helped by the signings of Albie Morkel and Shaun Pollock) it appears the marketing department are keen to repeat the dose of excruciating embarrassment for me, by commissioning ‘Men In Black II.’

	The other man in black, Gareth Breese © Durham CCC

Presumably, I thought, they would draft Gibbo in to provide the sequel with the necessary ballast. After all, ‘Men in Black II’ featured both the cool, mean Will Smith and the nerdy Tommy Lee Jones. Not so. Maybe Gibbo has realised that in assuming his role as England’s bowling coach, he has just risen above this kind of shenanigan. I don’t blame him.

So who to cast as my sidekick then? He has to be someone tough, someone who takes no prisoners, someone who has a threatening physical presence perhaps. It turns out Gibbo’s replacement is one of only two people in the squad who I actually might have covered in the height stakes! That man’s identity may surprise you; it is the one and only Gareth Breese – our loveable, pint-sized off-tweaker.

So, a few weeks ago, a similar photo-shoot took place. Of course it was all old hat to a seasoned ‘Man in Black’ like myself. I must say I had to guide Breesey through the tougher aspects of the shoot. He had trouble in particular trying to perfect the slight head-tilt, necessary to create the aura of such a brave world-saving hero. It took time, but we got through it in the end, and now the results are on display for all to see. ‘Men in Black II – Back in Black.’ Should you find yourself wandering through Newcastle city centre, or perhaps if you use any form of North-East public transport, then you may just notice us, two of the most un-intimidating cricketers imaginable, staring at you smouldering with intent. Don’t be scared.

For the mean time its back to my day job – the somewhat mundane matter of county cricket will make do for now, but I expect the job offers and castings to flood in due course.

On the pitch, the early season gripes about rain and no form seem to have disappeared for the time being. A few sunny days followed by a few runs in the second team, and all things seem rosy again. Cricket is an amazing game – the ups and downs can go from the richly rewarding to the excruciatingly frustrating. As a team, we are through to the quarter finals of the Friends Provident Trophy, after two victories over Bank Holiday weekend. We are defending champions of course, and a mouth-watering tie at home to Nottinghamshire next Wednesday is looming large on the horizon.

All that and then the explosive Twenty20 arrives in town. I believe we are running out to field to AC/DC’s ‘Back in Black’. You’ve got to hand it to our marketing department!

	'It appears there is a bit of needle kicking around between Essex and Middlesex' © Getty Images

It’s always good to start on a happy note and after Monday’s rained-off match at Hastings, we are now guaranteed qualification for the quarter-finals of the Friends Provident Trophy. We have one game left in the group stage (away to Middlesex) to decide whether we have a home or away tie but we’ve played some good cricket in the competition so feel we have a team capable of making progress wherever and whoever we play in the next round.

Wednesday’s match against Middlesex will be our eighth day of cricket (including friendlies) against our local rivals already this season – with more to add in the very near future! From a personal point of view I don’t feel that intensifies a rivalry because when you come across players so often you get to know them on and off the field, to the betterment of the relationships. What you can say for sure is that by the end of these matches we will know each other’s games inside out.

Our Championship match against Middlesex earlier in May did make a few headlines because of our decision not to allow our opponents to bring in a substitute wicketkeeper in our second innings when David Nash got injured. Although the decision is ultimately down to the coach and captain our collective view was that if a seam bowler got injured you can’t call in a substitute bowler so the same rule should apply to wicketkeepers.

It appears there is a bit of needle kicking around between the sides as a result of that decision so we wait to see how that impacts upon our forthcoming matches.

As it turned out our Championship game with Middlesex was one of the best victories I’ve been involved in for some while. When James Middlebrook and Chris Wright joined together in our second-innings run-chase it seemed the game was up but they came up trumps with an excellent unbeaten partnership.

Chris Wright had not had a lot of chances with the bat until that point but he had a good technique and timed the ball extremely sweetly on that afternoon. Our most recent Championship match – at home to Leicestershire – was one of the stranger four-day games I’ve been involved in. At the end of day one – with 18 wickets already done – it appeared we’d all be sat at home on Saturday with our feet up. After that, however, the wicket flattened out and Leicester ended up with a substantial lead to set us a tough run-chase on the last day.

Had Jason Gallian and Ravi Bopara gone into tea with unbeaten centuries then we could have mounted a charge in the final session. Alas it wasn’t to be so it came down to a matter of survival. Having felt out of touch in four-day cricket I was glad to get the chance to bat as much time as I could and with a couple of decent contributions down the order from David Masters and Tony Palladino we managed to hang on for a draw.

There was one nervous moment when last man Danish Kaneria spooned the ball just over mid-off’s head before it was down to me to survive the last over. At the end my exuberant fist-pumping celebrations were a mixture of relief at securing a draw and also at being able to bat for over four hours. There was a fair amount of needle in this match as well – as seems to be a regular occurrence these days! – so it was a good test of concentration and making sure I didn’t get involved in any potential confrontation.

Everybody has mucked in this season with good individual performances and it was my day on this occasion. That will be the key to a successful season or not.

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	A loss of form has meant a spell in the Middlesex seconds for Nick Compton, but he's determined to battle back to the limelight © Getty Images

The nature of cricket and sport more generally, is that quite often things don’t always go the way you would like. You may be injured at a crucial time just when you’re reaching form, you may be searching for runs when you know it may be your last chance or you may be playing well and doing the right things but still you can’t find a place in the team. People often say to me that it must be great to do something you love, to be in the sun all day, and 99% of the time this is true, but it can still be one of the most frustrating and stressful businesses out there.

I have been playing second-team games in the middle of nowhere with a mixture of young professionals learning their game and club cricketers looking to catch the eye of the second-team coach (or sometimes merely making up the numbers). In many ways it is even more of a challenge to play well in this arena. The bowling does not have the same quality as first-class cricket, so the intensity is considerably lower and the inevitable goal of achieving promotion or success in the various competitions isn’t there. After being in the first team for most of the last three years, it can be hard not to allow my standards to slip, but I think for these reasons you have to rely on yourself even more. I aim to do well and not to allow the nature of the game, the varying intensities of the players and the lack of good facilities to pull me down. Really I’m making it sound like one big excuse culture and at the heart of it that’s what it is. You can make the best of any situation and that only comes down to a simple choice.

If you had taken a look at the football pages of the newspapers in the past month you would see that all the euphoria surrounds the Premiership and Champions League races, but more specifically the heroes who have got their respective teams to the top. Ronaldo, Rooney, Lampard and Drogba are just a few of the big stars on show - but what happens when one of them gets injured or they have a bad season? No one writes about the Chelsea or Manchester United players who are not currently involved, the ones who are palmed off on loan for half a season to some First Division team miles away from their so-called home ground. They’ve got profile otherwise they wouldn’t have been signed by a big club and with that comes huge pride and both internal and external expectation; so to spend your time on loan has to be a very hard and painful route to go. They are not playing for the club whom they have loyalty. Their team mates forget them because they are not involved in the everyday hustle and bustle and what’s more the team they are playing for isn’t their own, so ultimately it must be a lonely existence.

That is what really interests me about sport. Justin Langer once said to a team-mate when he played for Middlesex, "If you get your runs no-one can touch you." What a true statement - but does this cloud our judgement? When a player is doing well everyone wants to know them. People they deleted from their mobile years ago call them up. Their parents are happy and full of pride. The local press man is suddenly friendly and wants to do a feature. Sponsors suddenly deliver an extra bat in the post when normally the allocation is three per season and team-mates are enjoying their company.

Then there are the times when a player is struggling to reach a hundred or take a bagful of wickets. Scoring runs or taking wickets should have absolutely no bearing on whether someone is a good bloke or not. Sport loves to find reasons why a player has failed. When you find yourself in that situation you have to learn to balance your emotions and not simply be happy when you are doing well and sad when not – though this is easier said than done.

Despite what is going on around me, whether it be team selection, an injury or stories in the press, my priority is to make sure that when that first delivery is bowled I am watching it like a hawk. If I can do that well then it gives me another opportunity to face the next ball and so on. Maybe writing this blog will prove to be more a reinforcement to my own development than of any interest to anyone else. Nevertheless it does make me admire those who have achieved in this game that much more. Not just the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, who has 10 million screaming fans following him around India daily, but the lower profile cricketer too, because everyone has their challenges however big or small.

So what do professional cricketers do on their day off? Most of the time is spent trying to scrub off hard-earned grass stains from the game just gone. It’s always a sign that you’ve got involved and made some sort of contribution. Between doing the washing, hanging it up on the couch, over the door or somewhere in the kitchen because there are no washing lines in London, you try to get some good couch time with the missus or even the ex for that matter. However, it isn’t long before you’re cruising up the M1 again. It is pretty much head down and full steam ahead once the early season weather dissipates.

The one thing I love about playing cricket in hot weather is that when you come off from a competitive game you are hot and sweaty and you feel like you’ve really got into the competition. I think when we spoke last I was talking about my first experience of playing in the snow, two weeks on and how things have changed – with a week of scorching weather in the lead-up to the first Test, followed by days of rain and cold wind again.

But whatever the summer brings, a good game of cricket with suntan lotion on is always going to be better than being stuck in a stuffy office - for the time being anyway!

	'Andre Nel seems to be the ‘King of Frustration’ in the Essex dressing room but that’s only because there is no skill involved in the game!' © Getty Images

I may have been the one ruled out of the Championship match at Derby with a thumb injury but I wasn’t the only Essex player suffering from frustration last week. Cricketers are always looking for something to fill in the time on rainy days and we’ve hit upon a real winner at Essex.

It all started at Taunton last year when much of the four-day game was affected by rain. As we were based out in the sticks we spent a lot of time stuck around the hotel. We stumbled upon a room that contained a lot of board games such as ‘Battleships’ and ‘Connect Four’. One particular game that caught the imagination was ‘Frustration’, which only one member of our squad could remember playing as a kid. Alex Tudor showed his age…

Everyone loved it so much that when we got to the end of our stay in Taunton we decided to buy the hotel’s box off them for a fiver, which has proved money well spent! Some of our boys end up spewing over that game because frustration really is the operative word. It’s all down to the luck of the dice so the boys can get very upset.

Andre Nel seems to be the ‘King of Frustration’ in the Essex dressing room but that’s only because there is no skill involved in the game! Andre’s always very quiet when he’s not winning but when he’s going well he shouts and screams uncontrollably…which you won’t find too hard to imagine.

My absence at Derby meant Adam Wheater was handed his Championship debut which brought back memories of my own one-day debut all those years ago – coincidentally, away to Derby. Warming up ahead of your first match when you know you are going to represent the team you’ve dreamt about playing gives you a real buzz. For me it was a very proud moment and I’m sure Adam felt the same way. Adam did exceptionally well during the game as he put on a key partnership with Ravi Bopara and also kept well. No doubt he’ll be a major player for Essex in the future – but hopefully not the foreseeable future, being a wicketkeeper myself!

After losing a tight game at Derby it was important to bounce back the following day in the Friends Provident Trophy at home to Sussex. Having spent the previous four days icing my thumb and taking anti-inflammatory pills it was heartening to discover a noticeable improvement on the morning of the game. I’d not done any catching since testing it ahead of the previous game and although it wasn’t perfect it felt good enough for me to play in a key game like that one.

Victory against Sussex (via Duckworth & Lewis) was due to an exceptional team performance. Our batting was built around Bopara and Grant Flower’s partnership, during which they expressed themselves terrifically. Ravi is a special player in the form of his life and Grant – in his first proper knock of the season – played one of the best and most confident innings I’ve seen him play for Essex. Ryan ten Doeschate then got some vital runs towards the end and I chipped in with a few right at the death to give us a challenging total.

Unfortunately we lost some overs due to rain which meant Sussex’s run-chase became something close to a Twenty20 game. We started off well in the field and the pressure built so that their required rate went up to 10 per over. It is difficult to sustain that when you are losing wickets and new players are coming in. Our guys bowled and fielded really well with lots of energy and a high skill factor.

Next up is a four-day tourist match against New Zealand at Chelmsford from Friday which I’m really excited about. It’s a good challenge to pit myself against international opposition. All the guys involved are really up for it because you always want to test yourself against some of the best players in the world.

It’s particularly exciting that New Zealand will have their IPL players back for this match. Included in those returning is my ‘oppo’ Brendon McCullum. What a player he is - his cricket is getting better and better. Brendon is a huge talent so it will be really good to see how he goes about his batting – will he continue to be ultra-positive like he’s been in the IPL or look to rein himself in a little? Hopefully I’ll get a chance to chat about a few bits and pieces with him on the keeping side during the game.

Finally this week I’d like to pay my own tribute to Joe Hussain, who died last weekend.
Joe coached me at Ilford Cricket School from the age of nine until I was 19. He gave me a lot of advice when I was younger and looked after me a bit. Joe definitely improved my game – he was the type of coach who let you play, show off your natural flair and then correct you accordingly.

Joe was very passionate about cricket and was obviously a driving force behind Nasser’s success as well as being very keen for his other ‘boys’ (those he coached) to do well. He will be missed.

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