It will be fantastic to have Stuart Clark come over from Australia and play a few games for us.

He will be a great replacement for James Franklin, while he is away playing for New Zealand in the Twenty20 World Cup, and we just hope Stuart gets his visa granted so that his arrival with us can be confirmed.

It's obviously a great opportunity for Stuart to play some cricket as he builds up his match fitness after surgery on an elbow.

And although there is likely to be criticism of Gloucestershire for giving an Australian Test player practice ahead of the Ashes series, I don't see why he shouldn't play for us.

In my opinion, looking at the bigger picture, the reason why the 2005 Ashes series was such a great one was that Australia and England both played their best cricket, and that made it a superb spectacle for cricket fans.

So if Stuart comes over here to play for us and gets into good form, so be it. Even if Australia play their best cricket, I still feel England are good enough to win the Ashes back.

There are 18 counties looking to get the right overseas signing and it's very hard to get a high-quality one like Stuart.

I'm sure any county would jump at the chance to sign him, as Kent did before the season started.

He didn't end up playing for Kent, because Australia selected him for a one-day series, and now it looks like he will join us instead.

He will suit our needs perfectly. He'll be available for a couple of County Championship games, against Derbyshire and Middlesex, and that should help us maintain the momentum we have built up from winning two of our first four matches. And he'll be able to play in our Friends Provident Trophy quarter-final against Nottinghamshire.

On a personal level, I'm looking forward to seeing what I can learn from him. He's a high-class bowler who I thought was one of the big differences between the sides when Australia regained the Ashes a couple of years ago.

Hopefully, he can improve my game, and, of course, there are a lot of young seamers at Gloucestershire who will also benefit from having him around.

Monday's Twenty20 Cup defeat to Worcestershire showed how much we missed James Franklin's all-round ability.

I've said before that he gives the team a great balance and I reckon we would have chased down Worcestershire's total of 145 quite comfortably had he played.

We bowled and fielded well in that game, but lacked a bit of composure with our batting. I'm sure we would have won if we had batted through our overs.

I was at the other end when our former player Ian Fisher took two of the three wickets which gave him a hat-trick.

Fair play to Fish, he's a good guy and he always did well for us in Twenty20. We released him last year and decided to look elsewhere, but Worcestershire signed him to play one-day cricket and I'm sure he'll do well for them.

The big positive for us on Monday was the performance of Gemaal Hussain, who took 2-17 in four overs on his debut.

Gemaal came down during our Championship game with Leicestershire earlier this month and had a bowl after play one day.

I liked what I saw then and there's no doubt he's got good raw materials to work with.

He's tall, hits the deck hard, bowls straight and has a good bit of pace. He can also bowl a good yorker, slower ball and bouncer, so, in time, I think he'll develop into a really good cricketer.

I've mentioned the importance of having strength in depth a lot this season and that's improved further with Gemaal on board.

There's certainly a lot of competition for the pace bowling places and Anthony Ireland, for instance, was really disappointed to be left out at Worcester.

But strength in depth is the perfect situation because there are always times during a season when you need to give someone a rest and bring someone fresh into the side.

Finally, I'm sure Somerset will be fired up for tonight's Twenty20 game against us at Taunton, especially after we gave a good showing against them down there in a pre-season match.

They've been playing some really good one-day cricket this season and I'm sure they were really disappointed to lose last Saturday's Friends Provident Trophy quarter-final to Sussex.

We need to bounce back after a poor start to our Twenty20 campaign, and it should be an exciting match.