WE WERE three wickets down with about 140 still needed to win when I went to the toilet in the dressing-room on Tuesday. I’ll spare you most of the detail, but it was partly a functional visit and partly a means of hiding because I don’t like to watch run-chases. Anyway, when I came out a while later, Shaun Udal said to me: “You’re confident aren’t you, wandering round without your pads on?” “What do you mean?” I asked. “Well, I’m in next and then it’s you,” he said. “You’d better get ’em on.”

Then I looked at the scoreboard, saw that quite a lot had happened while I’d been in the loo and got that sinking feeling again. It was Trent Bridge revisited. Except that we managed to sneak over the line against Australia three months ago, but we didn’t on Tuesday against Pakistan.

A few of our batsmen may have come in for criticism for getting out to attacking shots, and they will all be judging themselves harshly, but this is an approach that has served us well and I can’t see us changing it. I would describe the approach as positive, rather than aggressive. You can be positive about a defensive shot or you can be positive about leaving the ball; whatever you do, you should do it positively and that’s the attitude that we have as a team.

We were, however, hugely disappointed to lose a match in which we had done so much right. We would certainly have settled for chasing 198 to win if it had been offered at the start of the game, but Pakistan bowled well and made life difficult. As a bowler, it would be easy to think that the batsmen had thrown it away after we had done the hard work, but that is not the way we think. We win as a side and we lose as a side.

There was a double whammy for me when I was reprimanded after the game for failing to appeal as I celebrated when Salman Butt edged me behind in the second innings. Apparently, I didn’t turn around to check that the umpire had given him out and that has cost me 20 per cent of my match fee. All donations to the usual address please.

Touring the sub-continent is never easy for a seam bowler and we weren’t expecting the Test pitches out here to be particularly helpful, but they don’t come much flatter than the one in Multan. At least I hope they don’t, but now that Pakistan are ahead in the series, I’m not holding out much hope. We couldn’t even get much reverse swing because the outfield was fairly lush and, although the pitch was very dry, it wasn’t particularly abrasive. There were a few hints of reverse swing, but we couldn’t get the ball in a suitable condition to make it do much more.

What you really want out here is for the captain to win the toss and enable you to bat first. Whether it is Marcus Trescothick or Michael Vaughan who tosses up on Sunday, if he calls wrong, he’d be well advised not to come back to the dressing-room for a while. If he does, he is likely to be pelted with fruit and who knows what else.

We flew from Multan to Faisalabad after the game on Tuesday, only a 30-minute flight, which was fairly painless until we came in to land. First, we seemed to descend from 10,000 feet to just above ground level in the space of about five seconds. We then hit the ground at what seemed like a 45-degree angle, with the left-hand side of the plane crashing down first, shortly followed by the right-hand side. Then we bounced along the ground until it felt like we were going to run out of runway, before finally juddering to a halt. At this point the pilot was given a relieved round of applause. So we might have lost the first Test match, but at the moment we are all just thankful that we are still in one piece.

It was great to outwit Inzamam, but don't ask me how I did it

IT WAS very nice of Bob Woolmer to suggest in The Times yesterday that I bowled “the ball of the match” to dismiss Inzamam-ul-Haq in the second innings. I trapped him leg-before when he padded up to the second ball I sent down in the first over with the new ball.

The Pakistan coach said that I held the ball as though it was an outswinger, used my wrist to change the direction and foxed one of the era’s great batsmen. Well, I might have fooled Inzamam, but I also fooled myself. I was certainly expecting the new ball to swing, but on that occasion, I fell away slightly in my delivery stride, so the ball went straight on. So I got it in the right place but, other than that, there was a bit of luck involved. But if Bob thinks I’m a bit of a genius, who am I to disagree?