Bore draw not the end of the world for Peters

The visitors batted through the fourth day on a lifeless surface at the County Ground to finish on 227-1 and take a share of the spoils.

But while it was fairly evident from early on that a positive result wasn’t going to be forthcoming, Peters was glad to come away with a decent points haul.

He said: “If you’re not going to win a game then you want to draw with maximum points and that’s what we’ve done.

“It was very pleasing to make a big score with Salesy (David Sales) and Kyle (Coetzer) making big scores which is great. We talked before the game about how the top six hadn’t been scoring as many as we would’ve liked and we’ve put that right this game.

“Personally I feel like it was a bit of an opportunity missed to win a game but we didn’t lose and we got some good points out of it.

“We’ve taken a few points off Gloucestershire which is good and the Essex game down in Colchester is going to become a crucial one which, if we win, will put us in a really good position.”

It would be an easy criticism to direct at Peters that he didn’t make enough use of his frontline seamers in the pursuit of victory but he felt that his tactics were justified given the game’s close proximity to the Friends Life t20 quarter-final tomorrow (Tuesday) night.

He added: “The last couple of hours was pretty painful in that we didn’t want to flog someone like David Willey and he wakes up tomorrow morning and is unable to play so while I didn;t really want to do that, there was a good reason for it.”