Worcestershire Director of Cricket Steve Rhodes admitted it had been the wrong decision to bat first after winning the toss in the Royal London One-Day Cup clash with Yorkshire at Headingley.
The visitors were bowled out for 141 in 43.2 overs on a used wicket despite an unbeaten 43 from Joe Leach and suffered a six wicket reversal with Mitchell McClenaghan claiming three wickets.
Rhodes told BBC Hereford-Worcester's Dave Bradley: "It was a really strange wicket. The toss, actually, we got it wrong. Mitch (skipper Daryl Mitchell) and I both felt, with 90 overs already played on it, it was a hell of a lot drier than most fresh wickets you get at 10.30am.
"Our studs went in and flaked it a little bit which told us that it should be dry enough to bat and score some runs and try and get them on the board.
"The ball certainly jagged around a lot far more than we expected and, almost because we made the wrong decision to bat on it, things didn't go our way.
"We had some very tough lbw decisions I felt and also some freakish dismissals and some good balls as well, some really good balls that did quite a bit.
"It meant that we could never get the innings going.
"Joe Leach tried really hard with McClenaghan at the end there (in a last wicket stand of 39) but we were short of runs and it didn't do as much when we bowled.
"It certainly didn't seam around as much or jag off the wicket like it did for the Yorkshire bowlers early morning.
"I think we have to put our hands up here and say we got the toss wrong."
When asked if 200 would have been a good score, Rhodes said: "When we had the chat pre-toss, we felt if we got 250 it would be a really good score.
"To dip out and lose your top five or six batters for such a small amount of runs, it was difficult to get anything like 200."
Worcestershire opted to take their second powerplay between overs 11-15 after reaching 42-1 at the end of the mandatory 10 over powerplay.
But an inspired spell of 3-0 in six balls from Tim Bresnan meant the score quickly became 48-4.
Rhodes said: "It is something Mitch and I have talked about using early if we've not lost many wickets.
"The ironic thing is we took the powerplay and then wickets went bang, bang, bang – not through over aggressive play or anything like that just through the ball nipping around a lot, a tough lbw decision here and there.
"It made life difficult for us losing the wickets in that powerplay but when could we take it anyway because we lost so many wickets?
"It is like anything with powerplays and plans, you've got to do them right and sadly for us we were up against the cosh when the ball nipped around a lot in those opening two hours."
