WE'VE had to dust ourselves off pretty quickly from Saturday's disappointment at Finals Day because we have a massive five days of cricket ahead of us.

We face Nottinghamshire in the Championship at Scarborough this week and then Surrey in the one-day semi-final at Headingley on Sunday.

It's definitely a good thing that a Championship game comes so quickly to help us get over our Blast semi-final defeat to Durham because it was definitely a tough one to take.

You can lose games in the group stages and recover, as we did, but there was no recovering from that one.

We should have chased down 157 and we just needed somebody from the middle order to make a contribution. A 20 or a 30 would have made all the difference. Had I got another 20 off 15 balls, we'd have won the game.

We've worked so hard as a team to come back from winning just one of our first seven group matches, playing great cricket. Then, on the day, you just fall short. Unfortunately, that's what T20 is like and we weren't good enough.

We can reflect on several other things we should have done but ultimately we should have chased that down when you've got Liam Plunkett at nine and Adil Rashid at 10. The fault definitely lies with the batting.

We knew Mark Wood was going to be a threat but we let him get four wickets.

He bowled a great yorker to Jonny Bairstow and then Gary Ballance, on another day, would have got four for his shot five yards the other side of Paul Collingwood at short fine-leg.

A number of things went their way – inside-edges, catches falling short, that kind of thing. But regardless, we put ourselves in a great position at 70 or 80-3.

I just felt that if we could get over the line and into the final, we couldn't possibly play that poorly twice. We could have absolutely smashed the final against Northants – but it wasn't to be.

It was a good experience for the team to get to Finals Day again to show we are a decent white-ball side.

Now the test is to push onto the one-dayer on Sunday and then, further down the line, we need to keep backing it up by getting to more Finals Days.

Look at Northants – this was their third in four years. They're a small squad and, on paper, maybe not as talented as other teams, but they've found a winning formula.

We've found how we want to play our cricket now, so we can take some real positives from this season.

We don't have time to feel sorry for ourselves because there's some big games coming up in the next five or six weeks, starting with Notts.

It's a massive game. It's not a must-win but they are a team who have struggled for form this year. If we can play our brand of cricket, we'll put pressure on them over the four days.

Notts have obviously been strong over the last decade or so and have had a good team. They won't have found themselves in this position too often over the last few years, so it may be a good time to play them.

But we know they'll have plenty of fight, so we need to stay strong in what we do and hammer the basics, then hopefully we'll get the result we want.

Then, looking at the RL50, Surrey are a good team and Kumar Sangakkara just nipped them over the line against Northants last week with a century.

It's going to be tough because we lose all our England players, so the lads have got to come in and do the business. We're looking forward to it. It's a home crowd and hopefully we can get the right result.

We still have two competitions alive and that's a lot more than most other teams at this stage of the season.

I want to give a special mention to David Willey because he gave us an opportunity to win the game on Saturday by battling through his nasty hand injury.

He showed just what type of guy he is by coming back on to bowl his four overs and then open the batting. He puts himself in those tough situations and never anywhere else but for the good of the team.

It's disappointing for him to be out injured now with the one-dayers coming up. We wish him a speedy recovery.

* Alex and sponsors Pennine Business Partners are aiming to Hit Cancer for Six in 2016. They are donating £10 to the Laura Crane Youth Cancer Trust every time Alex hits a six or takes a catch and are asking cricket lovers everywhere to support this great cause, which provides special care and support to young people fighting cancer. Visit Pennine Business Partners' page on Just Giving at https://www.justgiving.com/Pennine-Business-Partners.