County are ‘low’ after another dismal day

The visitors, who resumed on 274-4 in the latest LV County Championship encounter, amassed a colossal 602-9 with both Sam Hain and Keith Barker registering centuries.

And then, to pour salt into an already open wound, they got stuck into the home side’s top order with Chris Woakes removing three of the top four for next to no damage.

That means the County will start day four on 51-3, still 239 runs from making Warwickshire bat again, and they will need to see out 96 more overs to prevent a sixth straight defeat.

And head coach Ripley didn’t hide behind any tired old excuses with his assessment of the day’s events.

He said: “The players are very low, it’s not the day we mapped out this morning.

“We’ve had some bad days, lets not kid ourselves, we haven’t played well in several Championship matches.

“In other we’ve competed at some level and we had that on the first day.

“We posted a reasonable score but today they had it pretty much all their own way.

“We’ve dropped some catches, we lost wickets at the end of the day and they posted a pretty formidable target so that’s put us on the back foot.”

Such a dire run of form can lead to internal ruin, as had happened in numerous cases, in sporting teams but Ripley insists that won’t be the case.

“There’s nothing we can do about that now and we’ve got to try and keep together as a group and support each other,” he continued.

“I don’t want us going off into batters and bowlers, I’ve seen that in the past and it’s very unheathy.

“We’re going to stick together and turn up tomorrow and try and have a better day than we did today.”