Glamorgan needed that win at Nottingham last Monday.

It has been a miserable start to the season for them, what with rain scuppering their opening two totesport League matches and then two woeful performances in the Championship leading to two thumping defeats.

So any win is precious and Glamorgan should take heart from it, even if it ended up being a desperately close-run thing.

I thought they were home and dry with 20 required from the last over, but Darren Thomas is not exactly in the bowling form of his life - despite achieving the notable milestone of 500 first class wickets last week - and he must have given Glamorgan fans a collective heart attack by conceding two consecutive sixes off the fourth and fifth deliveries of the over to leave young Samit Patel requiring another six off the last to achieve a scarcely credible victory.

Thankfully Thomas managed to bowl the required yorker on that last ball, in contrast to the previous two which had been juicy length balls which were dispatched over long-on and extra cover respectively.

A thrilling finish, unless you were the Glamorgan skipper - Robert Croft must have been having kittens.

A word about Patel, though. He is a twenty-year-old left arm spinner, who also bowled extremely well under enormous pressure. He might well be a name to watch out for in the future.

There were a lot of talking points at Trent Bridge. Firstly there was Croft's decision to bat Matthew Elliott at number five. Even though Glamorgan won and Elliott produced a delightful little cameo at the end, I disagreed with that decision.

He is Glamorgan's best batsman at the moment by some considerable distance - notwithstanding Mark Wallace's two excellent knocks against Surrey last week - and in my humble opinion should be given the longest possible time to bat in these games.

I agree that if Ian Thomas plays he must open because he is not really suited to knocking the ball around in the middle overs of a one day game, but I would have let him open with Elliott and dropped Croft down to three - somewhere he has batted with success before.

There are parallels, of course, with my situation when I was dropped down the order in one day cricket for Glamorgan - something which caused a lot of comment at the time.

I disagreed with it at first but came to realise that it was the best thing for the team. That was because I did not have the power of stroke to thoroughly impose myself in the first 15 overs - Elliott does, and is a much better player than I ever was and can adjust himself to suit any sort of condition or situation.

Anyway it is probably a one-off because it is hoped that Matthew Maynard will be available for the next totesport League match against Essex a week on Sunday. Maynard has been struggling with a nasty bronchial infection and our best wishes go to him for a speedy recovery.

Glamorgan also need a recovery like that in the Championship. I watched their match against Surrey and was very disappointed with the performance. Mind you, the pitch probably didn't help - a very unusual Sophia Gardens strip in that it had variable bounce, with especially steep bounce with the new ball making batting early on treacherous.

But Glamorgan were trounced by what can only be termed as Surrey's second team. When Glamorgan go to the Oval in a week's time they will probably face the likes of Harbhajan Singh, Azhar Mahmood, Mark Butcher and Martin Bicknell, all quality players who were unavailable last week. That must be quite scary for Glamorgan.

Naturally these two defeats have increased the clamour for a second overseas player. I have said in these pages before that I thought that Glamorgan should have signed one before the start of the season.

I never fully understood their reasons for not doing so, but it seems that they have pledged to stick by their home-grown players. That is an admirable stance, so in my view that is what they should continue to do.

To panic and buy in a second overseas now would be worse than not having signed one in the first place.

For instance, Ian Thomas must be given a run of five games as an opener in the four-day game. And I would like to see Jonathan Hughes get another game against Gloucestershire this week after the ignominy of a pair last week - "you've never played the game until you've bagged a pair" Graham Burgess used to tell me! - because you do not want him stewing over that for a month or so until he plays again.

The bottom line is that Glamorgan have hugely under-performed in the first two games. They can play much better and I expect them to do so against a Gloucestershire side who should hold no great fear for them.