Granted I was only watching via Sky but what disappointed me last night (asides from the loss) was that when Garton was out under pressure and Sylvester was being hit about there did not seem to be much support from the team. As I say at the ground it may have been different but on the screen they looked quite lonely out there.

When we had Brathwaite and Bresnan a couple of years ago, whilst limited playing contributions, they seemed to offer bags loads of personality and encouragement to the team. This did seem to be missing yesterday.

I would have hoped for more from Latham in this regards, a massively experienced international captain getting people’s ear and trying to keep heads up and offering bits of advice.

Bamber is indeed showing signs of being a great signing. To be fair to Rushworth, he was excellent in his first season I thought (without checking I’m sure he took 50+ wickets). Unfortunately injured since!

Will we make it to tomorrow?

Nail on the head.

We are an average side, our recruitment has not been great when it comes to red ball cricket for a few years.

We’ve been a bit unfortunate with overseas players picking up injuries but that’s the same across the country.

Lots of younger inexperienced players in and around the squad though. Hopefully we can get the coaching side of things set up correctly to help them flourish.

Careful, you know it's not permitted to praise our "woeful" opening batters here!

Looks like it could well be a struggle to bat today, a bit overcast with winds and some rain in the air.

Bizarre, right after the signing of the NZ test captain.

No news on the head coach still or anything about the end of season review.

There seems to be a real lack of leadership at the moment.

It’s interesting to see how his profile and reputation has skyrocketed in such a short space of time.

I hope it’s not a case of too much too soon, he will experience bad patches as all players do so I hope he has the right support network around to get him through.

For us it’s going to leave us even further depleted in the batting line up.

What about if you look at his averages and then look at them again without his top score!?

There was no vendetta against him, he simply did not perform for two season but was given more chances than others.

He had some great debuts though!

"As Albert Einstein said "To keep doing the same thing and expecting different results, is madness"."

A bit like a certain poster wanting to drop Yates and Davies for the past three seasons.

A fairly disastrous morning session! It would be quite an achievement to battle back from here.

Sam has certainly had a tough season, which makes the number of batting points so surprising! I don’t know what Franchise stuff he will be doing over the winter but I hope he comes back to us happy and healthy!

I don’t like to comment on unsubstantiated reports of dressing room disharmony but there does seem to be something up at the moment.

Essex have a terrific bowling unit who are able to exploit these sorts of conditions. I’d have Porter and Cook in a heartbeat!

Tough conditions to bat on and high quality bowling….its hard to be too critical.

Do the players just want the season to be over as well?

Wow, that escalated quickly!

I’ve really not enjoyed this season, we’ve been bad before but there is something about this year which is really grating and I’m not sure what it is.

Complacency? Self entitlement? Obvious shortcomings not being addressed?

I’ve just been left feeling detached and lacking any enthusiasm, even when we were winning matches in the T20 I didn’t seriously think we would progress as I simply didn’t think we were good enough.

And now we are struggling against our neighbours who lost several key players last year, have also had lots of injuries and are fielding players we deemed not good enough to play for us.

Demoralising.

Good rational points Andy, I agree with pretty much all of what you say.

I’m not sure about the length of the contracts for those you propose releasing though, if they are multi year deals then it would be expensive to jettison them all.

They won’t resign, why would they? They will be determined to stay and do better. Any decision will need to be taken by the director of cricket, that is what he is paid to do.

If we had scraped through I wouldn’t have fancied our chances against any of the others at Finals day to be honest though, especially with Bethall and Mousley unavailable!

The squad is ok but lacks the match winners other counties seem to have. We’ve said all season that the batting unit is light of a power hitter and so it proved again.

Very disappointing

I’m not one to call for people to be sacked but there has to be changes after this season. Recruitment has been poor, tactics questionable and mentality ill equipped to cope with the pressure of knock out matches.

Painful to watch.

Not Benjamin’s fault tonight, just a poor batting display from a poor batting unit.