England pace bowler Ollie Robinson, who picked up seven wickets for Sussex on day one against Worcestershire today, said: “Against Yorkshire, I felt a bit underdone really. I needed to play to get that feeling of playing again, fielding, time on my feet all day.
“I had a week off with training, felt really good, and it started off well here as well. It’s just getting that momentum of playing again.
“For myself, knowing my body now, I’ve just got to keep bowling. We’ve got two more Sussex games after this and then the Ireland Test (before the Ashes).
“I’ll try and play all of those, get in as many overs as possible and peak for the Ashes hopefully. It will be the biggest series of my career.
“You can see from last year how much the Sussex boys have come on. We are a young team anyway but they are all a year older and batting and bowling look so much better.
“Having Steve Smith and Cheteshwar Pujara is going to help them with that as well. We are looking good this year.
“Hopefully, the bad weather stays away here and we can pile on the runs and bowl them out again.”
Worcestershire batter Adam Hose, who hit his maiden half century for the club, said: “Basically the reason I moved (from Warwickshire) was because I wanted to try to play more cricket all summer round.
“I knew that opportunity was potentially going to be a little bit more open here as opposed to Warwickshire.
It was a pretty challenging first few hours. I thought they bowled really well. There was a fair bit in it for the seamers with the ball.
“To be able to soak up a bit of pressure with Rodders (Gareth Roderick) and build a partnership, and then come on the attack for a little period, was nice to do.
“For the whole of that partnership we were constantly working in blocks of five and that’s all we had to think about really, take each ball as it comes.
“It’s very easy to look too far ahead in those situations but I think it just goes to show when a couple of guys can soak up a bit of pressure, and then counter attack when the right moment is, that you can really build good partnerships. In the end I think we got to a half decent total.
“It kind of felt a different game when Ollie Robinson was bowling. We spoke about not being just static when facing him.
“We wanted to be fairly pro-active in terms of maybe not looking to be quite as aggressive but could still be positive in our running and dropping balls at our feet and just trying to put him off his length as much as we could. But, credit to him, he is a high-class international bowler and he showed it.”
