Bracewell hailed Richard Dawson's efforts at playing straight

Director of cricket John Bracewell says Gloucestershire's batsmen need to learn to play swing bowling if they are to maintain their push for promotion.

Gloucestershire lost within three days against Northamptonshire to record their third loss in a row in the Second Division of the County Championship.

"The games that we've lost this year have been when the ball has swung," he told BBC Radio Gloucestershire.

"It's as simple as that. We're not playing the swinging ball very well."

Bracewell was particularly frustrated to see his top order repeatedly play across the line as they went down to a nine-wicket defeat at Cheltenham.

James Franklin, Richard Dawson and Jon Lewis were the only men to reach double figures in each innings and Bracewell believes it is a mental issue that he and his side need to get to the bottom of.

The New Zealander added: "We've talked about it and it's now about doing it.

"The complexities of it are that we're playing well in the white ball cricket and batting with confidence and we're not batting with any assurity at all in the red ball game. Whether that's because it's swinging more I'm not 100% sure, and I'm not sure they are.

"We're looking to find solutions and we'll work hard on it next week.

"Sometimes you can overcomplicate things by searching too deep, and we don't want to go down that route.

"We have good debriefs and we're getting reasonably honest talk out of them. We're just not producing the goods at this point and we haven't done for the last three games now."

Having been top of the table, Gloucestershire are now third after playing a game more than the top two sides in the table, Kent and Derbyshire.

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