The draw at Surrey last week confirmed their drop from County Championship Division One.

From their previous 12 matches, they had only managed four batting points.

As a batting group, we got sucked into a bit of Bazball early on, said Sadler.

As we’ve seen how England play, a couple of lads may want to play that way to get noticed further up (by the selectors).

He told Radio Northampton, “We’ve seen some very good players play a little old-fashioned this year and still do very well.”.

Northamptonshire finished sixth in Division One in 2022, but have only won one game out of 13 so far this season. Despite relying on “good, hard, attritional cricket” last year, Sadler said there were a number of factors contributing to this summer’s slump.

“In the first block of six games, we lost five of them, but we won the one against Middlesex,” he said.

“We lost our captain for a chunk of those games, we lost our wicketkeeper, Sando [Ben Sanderson] wasn’t fit, he was in and out of the side and didn’t have as much zip as he has now.”

Emilio [Gay] had a knee operation two weeks before the season started, Tommy Taylor had a sore back, which is why we look to have squad depth.

I think we haven’t played good enough cricket for a number of reasons.”