I think the opening week of the season showed how good it is for Gloucestershire to have John Bracewell back as our director of cricket.

We had much the better of the drawn LV County Championship game with Surrey at The Oval and then had a very good win over Sussex in the Friends Provident Trophy last Sunday.

John's not really done anything hugely different since he came back, but the guys have optimum respect for him and really listen to what the leadership team is saying.

I know John was very happy with the squad that was available to him when he turned up, and I think he said it was a stronger squad than when he first joined Gloucestershire CCC in 1998. And he's right. It's a squad which I think has under-performed in the last three or four seasons, for whatever reasons.

John's got the knack of getting the best out of people and challenging people and making sure the senior players are on their toes and don't feel too comfortable.

It's always nice to know someone's watching your performances and there's a lot of passion for Gloucestershire cricket within the management team. It's been there before, but probably not communicated in the right way.

Last year, of course, we decided not to have a coaching chief, which meant even more responsibility for me as the captain.

Hindsight's a wonderful thing, but I definitely shouldn't have taken on as much responsibility as I did last year.

I should have concentrated on the cricket, but there wasn't really anyone else to do it. So it was quite a hard situation for me to deal with and I felt I had to take on the extra responsibility.

But, hey, I had a great learning experience and I think I'll be a much stronger person in the future for it. You have to learn from every experience and improve yourself and your game because of it. I feel very relaxed now playing my cricket and I feel I'm playing some good cricket. I've been very happy with the control I've shown and the movement I've got with the ball.

One of the most pleasing aspects of our win over Sussex was seeing Craig Spearman secure the win for us with an unbeaten 69.

It was important for Craig to get a score under his belt. Obviously, it was a pretty nasty facial injury he had last year and it'll be good for his confidence to have played such a good innings so early in the season.

The eye was a concern for him over the winter. I didn't talk to Craig about it, but I know he hit a lot of balls through the winter, which is something he wouldn't normally do.

He normally practices quite late. He usually picks a bat up in late March and then cracks on with it. He's always been very good at picking his game up quickly.

He practiced hard over the winter to make sure his eye was retrained and to make sure everything was okay. And, to be honest, the Sussex bowlers put him under a bit of pressure on Sunday. Luke Wright, in particular, bowled a heavy ball, and it was great to see him come through that. Hopefully, he can kick on and have a really good season.

I was also really pleased that Alex (Gidman) got a half-century at The Oval. Alex didn't have the best of times last season, but he worked on his technique over the winter and he put that into place at The Oval.

I thought he played really well and it was an important innings for him. You could feel the pressure come off him a little bit and it gave him confidence to captain the side well.

It's always nice when your captain is scoring runs and playing well. It's not massively important, because the main thing is to captain the team well. But as a captain, it makes it a lot easier when you are playing well yourself.

Spinner Vikram Banerjee and young pace bowler Ian Saxelby are two other guys who have started the season well for us.

I've been apologising to Vikram for not picking him in the last three years in one-day cricket.

He bowled well in our pre-season game with Somerset CCC and, again, he bowled nicely last Sunday. He's got some areas of his game he needs to work on still, but he's a young cricketer and developing nicely.

Saxelby's got good control of his lines and lengths. He bowls nice, full attacking away-swing and has got bundles of energy. He looks like another one who has got a promising future.

Finally, there's been quite a bit of talk about the wicket upon which we played this week's County Championship game with Essex in Bristol.

The idea, compared to last year, is to leave more grass on our wickets, so that, hopefully, the ball will carry though a bit quicker. There seemed to be a nice, even covering of grass on the wicket for the first day of the game with Essex, but there was also a bit of a soft top for some reason.

On Tuesday morning, there were quite a few indentations in the wicket from where the balls had pitched. Therefore, the bounce became more variable as the game wore on and the ball moved off those indentations.

So it was a slower wicket than I thought it would be and it was not as good a wicket as I thought it would be, because normally the first one of the season is a very good one.

INTERVIEW: Mark Easterbrook