"No room for mistakes now"

Frustrating was the word at Lord's. If it had rained for the whole of the final day then there's not much you can do but to get so close is disappointing. Unfortunately, you can't control the weather but we played some good cricket throughout the entire match and deserved the win.

It's a huge compliment to the way the lads played that Vaughney said it was the best England had played since the 2005 Ashes. Our bowling attack performed exceptionally on that wicket and I thought Jimmy (Anderson) was awesome. It shows what we can do and it's nice to have that kind of back-up and we've so much strength in depth now. Players on the circuit will tell you how good Ryan Sidebottom is and Jimmy has come back and shown great form since bursting onto the scene and Twiggy (Chris Tremlett) on his debut was great. Anyone who's 6ft7 at 85mph will be a handful but his control impressed everyone.

I think it's well documented that Sachin Tendulkar is Monty's cricketing hero so it was great for Monty to get him in the second innings. We never heard the end of it when he got Sachin out in India for his first test wicket and I think Sachin said that was once in a blue moon. There are obviously two blue moons and hopefully a few more than that! You could see his celebrations were even bigger than the ones in Nagpur. I've had him flying past me at short leg a number of times now and it's tricky timing the celebration for the high five because he's usually pretty erratic with them! But it's always nice having a laugh with the lads trying to catch up with Monty on a celebration run.

Great is probably an understatement!

As for KP's innings, great is probably an understatement. The pitch got a little bit flatter after lunch but the way he dominated and set himself up was phenomenal and if he keeps batting like that, the sky's the limit. He's an awesome player and I'll enjoy watching many more of his runs.

As for myself, I came out on the wrong side of a couple of close LBW decisions and I've been on a run of them but that's cricket. You get away with a couple in your career and other times you get slightly contentious ones, so you take the rough with the smooth. I was obviously disappointed but it makes you more hungry to score runs next time. But I thought the umpires had a great game and it's such a hard job at the best of times. We're talking about margins that are so slim and it's just unlucky for me that I got a couple of slightly indifferent decisions.

No room for mistakes now

Next up it's Trent Bridge and we've got to focus all over again. We played well at Lord's but as Vaughney said, consistency is the key for us. If we play as well as we did there we'll be fine but we've got to make sure we practice hard, get on top of them again and hope the weather holds this time! It's a two match series now and there's no room for mistakes.

Alastair Cook.

Ask Alastair a question

Win a signed bat and gloves!