Anthony McGrath column: Although it was disappointing to lose against Durham, on a personal level I was delighted to finally be back playing.

It has been a while since my operation and to get back out there was really pleasing.

I must say I was pretty stiff having not played that much cricket recently but the only way you get over that is through playing games.

It is good to get the first one out of the way and I cannot wait to go again. Hopefully it will only be a matter of time now before I get my first big score. Once that happens, I am confident that I can go on and have a successful summer.

I think as a team we can take some positives from the defeat last week as well.

Although we did not play well enough over the four days, we did fight back well on the final day and could have managed to salvage a draw in the end. These things happen though. It is a long season and one win from two is not the end of the world.

Our focus turns to this week now and I know the whole squad is looking forward to getting straight back into action against Nottinghamshire.

Ryan Sidebottom will definitely be up for it. There are not many of us left from when he was first around but I think we have seen since he came back from Notts what a big player he is for us already.

He has played a lot of International cricket since he left in 2003 and has really matured as a person. That has really helped the younger players already because we have got a young team. It is quite nice to have somebody else my age in the dressing room too!

We know that Notts will come into this week’s game with a lot of confidence. They had a good win last week against Hampshire and so we are going to have to play better than we did against Durham if we want to give them a good game.

So far this season, even in the win against Worcestershire, we have probably not quite hit our full straps.

We are not being as consistent as we can be with the ball yet and our batters, Gerard Brophy aside, have not yet got the big hundreds that we need either.

Hopefully we can turn that around, starting this week.