WILTSHIRE captain Ed Young admits the margin of his side’s defeats in the Unicorns Knockout Trophy is what cost them a place in the quarter-finals.

Young’s troops were without a game at the weekend, having finished their Group Four programme with an eight-wicket thumping at Hertfordshire on May 14, and they slipped to third in the table following the final round of fixtures.

Wiltshire and Suffolk both finished with four points from their four pool games as Hertfordshire led the way with six, but it was Young’s side who missed out on the latter stages due to an inferior net run-rate.

The other defeat Wiltshire suffered was a 105-run drubbing at the hands of the Suffolk side that pipped them to second place, which proved to be the county’s downfall.

“It’s a bit gutting. I thought going into the campaign, we had a really, really good chance of going through and progressing in the tournament,” said Young.

“The performances we put in at the end of last year were really good, we had some new players, such as Wes Durston coming back, and I thought we had a really strong team on paper.

“We played some really good cricket but whereas in previous years winning two games in the group has usually been enough to squeeze in, with how the results fell this year, it hasn’t paid off for us.

“I haven’t looked at the table and how close it was but at Suffolk we lost by 100 runs and at Hertfordshire we lost by eight wickets and those margins make a difference.

“When you look back, we lost those quite significantly so we aren’t dwelling on key moments thinking that if they’d gone our way, it might have made a difference.

“The two games we won, we played really well, it’s just a shame we couldn’t put performances in consistently enough to progress to the knockout stages.”

Wiltshire will now regroup before they turn their attentions to the start of the Unicorns Championship season, which begins with an away match at Oxfordshire starting on June 4.

Young added: “It gives a bit of time for the guys to go away and play for their clubs and get some more cricket under their belts. Hopefully then we can hit the three-day campaign running and try to get some success in that.”