BARNT Green skipper Dougie Brown is not pressing the panic button after a poor start to the Birmingham and District Premier campaign but is targeting an improvement in the standard of their batting.

Last season’s champions have lost two of their first three games, including being bowled out for 42 at home to Brockhampton in reply to the visitors total of 116 all out.

Brown said with the same players as last season, it was just a poor start to the season and he wasn’t overly worried about the results as it was early on.

He said: “We didn’t really get going in our reply on Saturday and seemed to nick everything to their slips.

“We lost some poor wickets, but the bowling and fielding wasn’t really a problem so there was definitely some positives.

“We just need to string some batting together because we haven’t done that as yet, although we are only three weeks into the season.”

“Having said that we can’t afford to keep losing games — we have to start to get back on track soon.

“We have a difficult one at Berkswell on Saturday who are top and obviously have started well.”

There was some joy for Green on Sunday when they got through to the next round of the National Knock-out tournament after beating Leicester Ivanhoe by four wickets.

They will now go on to face Knowle and Dorridge in the next round.

James Ord will be back for the Berkswell trip on Saturday after missing the Brockhampton game.