Hampshire cricket chairman Rod Bransgrove has described tomorrow's championship match against Gloucestershire at the Rose Bowl as "a must win game".

Bottom of the table Hampshire resume their championship campaign after a three-week Twenty20 break as the only side in the second division not to have won a match.

But Bransgrove reckons wins against Gloucestershire, who occupy the third promotion position, and Northants next week will put the county back on course for a double promotion.

He said: "At the start of the season we set ourselves the target of winning promotion in the National League and the championship and we've got the management and the players to do it, we've just got to learn to finish games off.

"We've been a little unfortunate. We did very well to take 17 wickets on the last day against Durham. At Glamorgan we could have played for seven days and not got a result and we had that very close draw at Worcestershire in the first game, but we have to start turning winning positions into wins."

Bransgrove added: "We were very disappointed to go out of the C&G Trophy at the first attempt and would have liked to have done a lot better on the field in the Twenty20 Cup, but I think it's very difficult to make a judgement on where teams are after just six games.

"We're doing well in the National League but I think we're in a false position in the championship. I normally wait until eight of the 16 games have been played before I make a mid-season review and we've got two games before that midway point, against Gloucestershire and Northants, which we regard as must win games."

Hampshire's Twenty20 campaign was a bitter disappointment on the field but the Rose Bowl's three Twenty 20 games attracted an aggregate crowd of more than 18,000 - and gate receipts of approximately £200,000.

Bransgrove added: "I wasn't expecting more than 5,000 for the Surrey game so to get more than 6,500 certainly superseded my expectations. There might not have been anything riding on the game itself but it just showed that people like watching cricket as a spectacle and want to be entertained.

"We've had substantial gate receipts that more than made up for the loss of cricket we had during the wet spell in May. All the counties that I've spoken to have been overwhelmed by the response from the public."

Hampshire have named an unchanged championship side to face Gloucestershire, a match that will be dedicated to the memory of the late Sir Ronald Ferguson.

Bransgrove added: "Sir Ronald Ferguson was a man many of us at Hampshire remember with a lot of fondness."