Lehmann: Outlaws too good in all departments against Steelbacks

The Outlaws had struggled at times after winning the toss and opting to bat, but a late surge took them up to 164 for eight.

And that proved to be too much for the Steelbacks as they were bowled out for 140, suffering a second successive home defeat in the Vitality T20 Blast.

“They were too good in all departments," Northants head coach Lehmann said.

"We were sort of 10 per cent, 15 per cent off and that hurt us in the end again.

"So, yeah, we’ve just got to get better at chasing totals.

"We know that and we have to get blokes making big runs.

"They had Tom Moores (who hit 53 from 27 balls), I thought played really well. He controlled the game for them and from our point of view we have to be better at adapting and changing to conditions.

"We could have used spin a bit more, we spoke about that. But again, if you're 10 or 15 per cent off against any opposition, it's going to make it tough work.

"So, full credit to Notts and we've got some work to do.

“We’ve got to get batters doing the majority of the batting and we've left it to the tail - nine, 10, 11, who hadn’t batted in the first six games. They’ve batted now. So, certainly the batters have a bit of work to do.

"But it's not that they’re not working hard or trying, because they’re certainly doing that, which is pleasing. They’ve just got to get better at adapting to conditions.

“I think the batting performance against Durham (last week) was the worst because we were about one for 80 off nine overs and in control that game so we should have got there.

"This one was maybe 10 above par, but it still wasn't a bad wicket and we just didn't get ourselves into position at all really to chase these down."

The Steelbacks now face back-to-back County Championship Division Two matches before returning to Blast action with a home game against Lancashire Lightning on Friday, July 4.

And Lehmann said: “We’re six and two (six wins, two losses), so that's the pleasing thing for us. You wouldn't want to be two and six, so there's the positive.

"We have a bit of a break, get back into Championship cricket now, which we're looking forward to (at home to Middlesex) on Sunday, have a couple of weeks of that, then get back into the final stretch of T20 games. We've got six left.

"We want to win every game we play, so we’ve just got to get better at the T20 format and we weren't as good as we'd like on Friday night.”

Moores was the star of the show for the Outlaws against the Steelbacks.

“The squad are feeling great," Moores said. “It's a great win.

"We've had such a mixed start to our campaign. We've shown some unbelievable stuff, and what this group can do, we just haven't been able to gather any momentum and string a few wins together. And I think we've just got to keep taking the belief that this tournament's still real live for us.

“I've been involved at this club for a decent amount of time now, and we've gone on and won it from stages like this, where it's not always been perfect and plain sailing, but we keep fighting, we keep getting better through the tournament, we have different people put their hands up at different times.

"Hopefully, we have a bit of a break now where the lads go and play red ball, and we come back and we go again, and we can all just keep fighting our way through and try to push for a qualifying spot.”