The routine of playing, travelling and playing again just comes at you bang, bang, bang.

Taylor is a world-class keeper

Marcus Trescothick was telling me the other day that on his first tour, to Pakistan 18 months ago, he felt mentally drained half-way through, which is how I've felt.

Sometimes I've found myself just not on my game. The routine of playing, travelling and playing again is hard on the body and it just comes at you bang, bang, bang.

I've had some good chats with Duncan Fletcher and Nasser Hussain and they told me to take a couple of games off and just rest.

I've still been practising hard but I've been trying to chill out at bit too, which is really hard because you're always doing something on tour.

Tour atmosphere

Hopefully I'll be picked for the next game, although I won't find out until Friday, but I'm not worrying about it.

Marcus has done really well with the gloves, and he looks good as a keeper. We've been training together and helping each other out a bit.

That's the case with the whole team - we are a young side but there are some experienced guys here and everybody has been looking out for each other.

Trescothick has looked good behind the stumps

There has been a really good tour atmosphere throughout, even when we lost the first two games.

After the second game in Wellington, we had a good chat about what was going wrong and identified what we needed to do to put it right.

We realised that we needed more energy in the field and again it's shown the character of the side that we've improved it and did well in Napier.

We took great confidence from that win and we're viewing these last two matches as the knockout stages of a tournament.

The last match was a quarter-final and Saturday is a semi-final - if we lose it we will lose the series so it is a similar sudden death thing.

Lower order

We batted well in Napier, excellently towards the end, and our lower order batting has been a focus on the tour.

I've talked to Duncan about my batting, having a gameplan and working on my technique to make me more effective down the order.

Opportunities with the bat have been limited since the Test series

It's likely that I'd be batting in the last five or six overs, which is a difficult place to bat in any team, so I need to add a couple of extra shots to my repertoire to make sure I can keep the scoreboard ticking.

You need a release shot, which may be a bit of a risk but which takes the pressure off and opens things up a little.

But as with the rest of our game, Duncan has been telling me to take it one step at a time, work on one shot and when I've mastered that move on to another.

It would be nice to bat a little further up the order but on merit I won't get in any higher at the moment.

Hopefully, if I'm in the England set-up for the next few years, I'll move up a little further.

But the focus is on keeping it simple, and the next step is Auckland on Saturday.