Hampshire head coach Craig White reflected on his side's innings-and 97-run defeat at Essex, admitting: We can't make excuses.

After Hampshire were skittled for 115 and 148 by the new Specsavers County Championship leaders, he said:  “I’m hugely disappointed. We batted overall for 80-odd overs for 280 runs and that’s just not good enough.

"We can’t make excuses. The pitch did a bit, but that’s first-class cricket and you’ve got to adapt and you’ve got to be able to cope with those situations. We didn’t do that.

“We’ve got a little bit of a history of losing wickets in clumps – four or five or six at times. We’ve got to start stopping that. It’s just soaking up the pressure - keep calm and it gets easier. But we’re not doing that.

“It’s one game, not a great performance, but there is such a lot of cricket to come. One bad performance doesn’t make us a bad team. It’s been one bad game, the three before [in the Championship] were very good.

"Maybe we had a hangover from our one-day cricket where we didn’t do very well, so maybe there was a lack of confidence floating around, I don’t know.

“We’ll let the dust settle and sit down and discuss next week’s team. We’ve had a blip in this game, we want to see us bounce back. Hopefully we’ll do that down at Somerset.”

Essex captain Ryan ten Doeschate led the praise for Jamie Porter, who had match figures of seven for 45. He said: “I thought Ports bowled fantastically well. It was one of the best opening spells I’ve ever seen.

“He bowled really well in the first three games and was probably a bit unlucky not to take more wickets. But nothing to this standard. He was relentless with his lengths and his lines in this game. That can happen when you bowl well and don’t get wickets – if you keep doing the right things then eventually you are going to pick up a bagful like he did today.

"[Hampshire] didn’t have a lot of luck, we played and missed a lot. Those guys [Alastair Cook and Tom Westley] had to mentally strong to get through that first day, and even yesterday the wicket wasn’t easy. But we backed up our batting with some really good bowling and it was a quick and very successful win for us.”