Joe Denly

Waking up on Monday morning, I went to my Twitter account and read what had happened to Tom Maynard. Like most people, I just couldn’t believe it.

When you play county cricket, you get to know people from other teams on and off the field, and Tom was a really lovely lad – a great talent with a bright future and an absolute gentleman too.

There was a presence about Tom when he came out to the crease, and he was one of the cleanest ball strikers around. It’s a tragic loss and my thoughts and best wishes go to his family, all his friends and everyone who knew him.

It’s not surprising that everyone was a bit down in the dressing-room at Hampshire later that day and at one point there was some question over whether we were actually going to play the game.

I’m glad we did because I found that focusing on the game helped to take my mind off the devastating news – and it was nice to get off the mark with our first win in the t20.

Paul Stirling especially showed what an exciting talent he is – he hits the ball hard and he hits it to pretty much every part of the ground. Thankfully I’ve never had to bowl at him and, when he’s in that sort of form, I wouldn’t want to.

The t20 is all about momentum and obviously we want to carry that into our next few fixtures, starting with Essex on Thursday at Lord’s.

Essex are competitive in t20 every year – they bat pretty much all the way down and they’ve got an experienced bowling attack, so we can expect a difficult game.

One other fixture I’m particularly looking forward to is when we go to Canterbury next week – which will be my first time back there since the move to Middlesex.

It’s a chance to see a few old friends and hopefully I won’t get too many boos from the crowd. I haven’t found too much form in the t20 so far, so maybe I’m saving it all for Kent!