Hornchurch captain Billy Gordon knows they have to start beating sides like Brentwood in order to win the Hamro Foundation Essex League after finally getting the monkey off their back this season.

Gordon’s men make the trip to the Old County Ground on Saturday as they look to build on their first win of the season over Colchester last weekend.

Prior to that it had been a frustrating start for the Harrow Lodge outfit but they’re hoping they can now kickstart their campaign.

“It’s always a tough test, a difficult place to win, but if we want to win the league then we have to beat teams like that,” Gordon said.

“We will have to be on it that’s for sure and hopefully the weather does us a favour, one day we might get a summer!”

Put into bat against Colchester, they posted a score of 204-6 with Adeel Malik (71) leading the way.

The hosts managed a score of 104-2, chasing a revised target of 113 in 30 overs with captain Gordon (2-28) the star with the ball.

“It was good to get the game on to be honest as when we first got there, the outfield and run-ups were looking wet, so we were a bit worried," he added.

“Both teams wanted to play so we basically just got started and we batted first, it wasn’t a bad pitch, we did alright with a couple of us getting starts, Ronnie (Saunders) and myself, then Adeel come in and batted superb to get 70-odd which got us to a decent score.

“You could see the rain coming when we started bowling and we were worried as we thought we might not get many overs in but luckily we did.

“It was a weird one as they could have accelerated more, but I still think with the bowlers that we have they weren’t really going at a rate where if we’d gone the whole way I still don’t think they would have won, even though it looks that way on the scorecard.”

Hornchurch suffered a 76-run defeat to Brondesbury in the National Cup the following day, though, and Gordon added: “It was a nightmare day from the start, we turned up with half a team, and then one of our players got injured in the warm-up and then one of our bowlers got injured in the first over so we were fighting a losing battle from the start.

“When you turn up to a National Cup with half a team it never goes well as you don’t come up against a bad side in that competition.”