SOMERSET director of cricket Matt Maynard called for a change in attitudes after Somerset suffered their third County Championship defeat of the season against Hampshire on Sunday.

Set a target of 259 to win, the hosts were all out for 168 to lose by 90 runs at the Cooper Associates County Ground.

Maynard said: "[The batting] was timid today, and throughout the game really - it's not the brand of cricket we were playing last season.

"It comes down to confidence, but also for me it comes down to the team not working together as well as they could be - off the pitch and on the pitch.

"I'm a big believer that you see your team training, that intensity around practice, you see guys helping each other out.

"The skipper [Tom Abell] is an amazing example in that regard - he's out every morning throwing at other batsmen - but other batsmen just pop in, do their thing, and pop back out.

"So some of the players are getting a bit internalised, as opposed to utilising their team-mates and giving their team-mates support.

"Part of that was discussed in the dressing room - you don't have a successful team by internalising - and that's going to be the big focus this week."

Asked whether he planned to bring new players in for the match away to Middlesex next weekend, Maynard seemed reluctant to make wholesale changes.

"I always prefer to change a winning side... we'll have to have changes as Craig Overton's been selected for the Lions.

"We'll get up to Lords, see if it's a fresh or a used wicket up there, but we'll have to wait until Thursday when we practise.

"As I've said before, you always give people one too many games rather than one too few.

"But we have players like Jim Allenby in great form in the one-day game, and the 2nd XI players have a great opportunity in the four-day match this week away against Warwickshire, to put pressure on Tom and myself." 

Skipper Abell reflected: "It's massively disappointing, and not good enough.

"All three games that we've lost, we've been in decent positions, and it's our batting that's letting us down time and time again, so it's something that needs addressing quickly.

"We need to be more ruthless, make it more difficult [for the opposition] - too often we're going bang, bang, bang [after a dismissal].

"Without a doubt there's three or four of us [in the middle order] who aren't performing as we need to be.

"With the exception of Dean [Elgar] and Tres [Marcus Trescothick], as batters we're not up to the mark at the moment.

"Perhaps we went into our shells a little bit today, and the pressure got a hold of us, so I don't think we played with the freedom [Hampshire] did."

He added that the responsibility lay with the underperforming batsmen to turn the team's season around.

"We can't sit there feeling sorry for ourselves - we've got ourselves in this mess, so we need to step up and get out of it," he said.

"There have been positives to take - we've played some decent cricket at times and our bowling's been really good, so we just need to back that up with the bat."