ST PETER shook his head and tut-tutted as he looked over the ledger of the newly-arrived subject standing before him at the Pearly Gates.

"I'm afraid you have rather a lot of sin to atone for and so I cannot allow you straight into Heaven," he said. "I'm going to have to set you a task so you can prove your worthiness."

"It's a fair cop," said the man. "Tell me what I must do."

"Well, it's not an easy one," added the saint. "I want you to return to earth and empty the Atlantic Ocean using only a small bucket."

The man was horrified. "That's impossible! Surely there must be some other way I can show how much I want to get into Heaven."

"There is but one more task I could set you," said St Peter. "You must turn Derbyshire into a winning one-day team."

The man sighed. "Give me the bucket," he replied.

Apologies for the old joke but Derbyshire's miserable form in one-day cricket is becoming a bit of an old story in itself.

John Morris was not in the mood to laugh about it after seeing his side throw away the chance to win another game in the Pro40 League on Saturday and it was easy to understand why.

Even though Derbyshire have made a kind of progress in limited-overs cricket this season – winning seven matches in the three competitions in 2008 after winning only three in 2007 – it is still a far from impressive record.

Worse still, a promising Friends Provident Trophy campaign was followed by disappointing returns in the Twenty20 Cup and the Pro40 League – so where did Derbyshire go wrong?

The relative success in the FPT, when the Phantoms could count themselves unfortunate not to qualify through the group stages because of the weather, allows us the chance to look at what they did to get it right and what did not happen when it went wrong.

This gives us a few clues.

The first glaringly obvious difference is at the top of the batting order. The three wins in the FPT were built around opening stands of 132, 71 and 150, yet only once in the Pro40 were Derbyshire able to get off to anything like as good a start and that was when Chris Rogers (pictured below) and Dan Birch put on 75 chasing a huge total against Essex.

The big stands in the FPT were between Rogers and Steve Stubbings but, out of form in the Championship and far from the sharpest in the field, Stubbings was completely out of the frame for the Pro40 and though Rogers continued to contribute well, he did not strike a flourishing partnership with either Birch or Greg Smith.

Rogers and Birch averaged 30 for the first wicket in five Pro40 matches, while Rogers and Smith averaged less than five in three games.

Having failed to make a good start, the Derbyshire middle and lower order were too often unable to take up the slack.

Wavell Hinds and Rikki Clarke occasionally contributed a good score in the Pro40, John Sadler, Dan Redfern and Tom New were moderately successful but Smith, Graham Wagg, Jon Clare and Jamie Pipe were stone cold with the bat.

The effect was that, as we saw in the final match against Warwickshire, even when there was one major innings to play around, support was thin on the ground and so the team score fell short.

But the problems were not all with the bat. Derbyshire also gave up more runs than any other team in their division and, because they batted second in seven out of their eight Pro40 matches, the batting was under pressure from the start.

Unquestionably, they did miss two of their most effective bowlers from the FPT.

Charl Langeveldt took 13 wickets and Tom Lungley eight in the six FPT matches in which they bowled but Lungley did not play at all in the Pro40, while Langeveldt played in only three – and one of those was the Kent debacle where no bowler in the world could have salvaged that situation.

One plus was that Ian Hunter emerged as Derbyshire's most effective bowler in the Pro40 with 10 wickets in six matches but the seam attack generally lacked teeth and the spinners, typified by Nayan Doshi, contained but did not penetrate.

In those games where they chased, Derbyshire allowed their opposition an average score of 227 and they were able to overhaul that only once, though they did also force a tie in another.

Plainly, Derbyshire were not a good chasing side, though they won the toss and opted to bat second in four of their seven chases. In the FPT, two of their three wins came through batting first.

This calls into question the wisdom of choosing to bat second, though they did also make an awful mess of batting first at Canterbury and lost five out of six when they batted first in the Twenty20 Cup.

The top and bottom of it all, backed up by the statistics, was that Derbyshire are still not very good at limited-overs cricket, no matter what tactical approach they attempt to execute.

That had been a major headache for head of cricket Morris this season and searching for a winning formula will be high on his priority list, though ultimately the players have under-performed and there is not much any amount of tactical planning can do about that.