Last of the 2007 whine
2007 County Championship Season
How to describe Yorkshire’s season? Ask the membership and you’ll get the same answers as every other year. Some will launch into an interminable lecture, explaining how every player wearing the white rose ‘back in the day’ made Gary Sobers look like Derek Pringle. Whilst others will tell you that the modern day lads don’t show enough commitment to the county and are all too happy to go and ply their trade elsewhere. A point which is rather undermined by the knowledge of how many of the faithful drive up for the day from the stockbroker belt.
Hertfordshire: Quite a commute when you work at Harry Ramsden’s
As for me, I’ll go for a slightly more succinct description – bipolar. How else do you rationalise four commanding victories, two by an innings, being equally matched by the same record against us? We even managed to go from an innings and 200+ run victory against Warwickshire to an innings and 200+ run defeat against Sussex within the space of a fortnight. If your teenage son were acting that erratically, you’d start to suspect he was freebasing your ear medicine.
That’s not to say we should expect to go throughout the season undefeated. As you could ask how it’s possible to win the championship if you lose two of your first three games by an innings? Or if you’re bowled out for 102, 139, 145 and 151? Or if you find yourself 3/14, or 4/26, or 5/34, or 5/43? Or if you lose four middle order batsman for 15 runs, or the last five for 20, or four wickets for just nine runs? Because that’s exactly what happened this year. As these are all situations Sussex found themselves in.
We had too many collapses of our own for comfort and at times suffered ‘collective failure under pressure’. But the difference is that sides like Sussex are able to carry the momentum from when they start to win through to the end of the season. That and they have a world-class leggy who can lock up an end, all day for them.
Chris Adams captures the County Championship: Possibly the greatest coming together of evil since Sting learnt to play the lute.
By and large, our batting stood up for much of the year. Mags got off to a slow start but still finished with almost a thousand runs. Rudolph, who started as a replacement for Lumb, ended up scoring the weight of runs you’d expect from Boof. Whilst Younus, who started as the replacement for Boof, ended up filling Lumb’s role, by scoring most of his runs in three innings. The difference being, two of them were double centuries.
The real bonus came from the lower middle order of Brophy, Rashid and Bresnan who scored almost two thousand runs between them. Add in some useful knocks from Gough & Dizzy and all of a sudden we had a tail capable of turning par scores into winning ones.
The big problem came from the openers. As after scoring a century in the opening victory at the Oval, Chalky managed just 322 runs more in his next ten matches. Thinking back to the way he smashed Surrey’s spinners around in that first match, I can’t help wondering if we missed a trick by not swapping him and Rudolph round in the line-up.
Perhaps even more worrying, was the falling away of form by Sayers, as the time he spent out of the team during the 20/20 cup seemed to have a massive effect. Before the break, 587 runs @ 58.7, afterwards 157 @ 17.4. Ouch. It reads like Steve Harmison’s career in reverse. Perhaps next year we should give him a go in 20/20 colours? Although that does sound a bit like taking a push-iron onto the outside line of the M1.
You can dress it up to look different, but will it go any faster?
Our bowling proved to be much more of a mixed bag. Hoggard was a match winner when fit and available. If that’d been all season we’d have finished much higher in the table. And Gough did as well as you could hope too. Ok, given the need to nurse himself through the season, he mostly bowled with the new ball. But it’s not the job of a 36-year-old with a history of knee injuries to put in the hard yards.
Brez had a harder season with the ball, often only being brought on as second or third change. As a result, at times he found himself in a bit of a chicken and egg situation. Bowling like a stock bowler because he was used as one, used as a stock bowler because he was bowling like one. I’d like to see him shown a bit more faith, given a chance to get at the batsmen before they’re set and asked to bully them with his aggression. He’s a big old unit, time to get a bit more of that behind the ball when he sends it down.
Tim Bresnan: Time for a bit more salad bar, a bit less hotel bar
The big disappointment was Dizzy, who just didn’t take the wickets you’d expect or want from your overseas pro. Perhaps that yard of pace he’s lost since at his peak means he can’t get away with bowling the slightly shorter Australian length over here anymore? Perhaps he needs harder surfaces than we’ve had in the last two rain effected years? Perhaps it’s just a case of wrong man, wrong club, wrong time? But whatever it is, next year we need an overseas pro who can be a consistent cutting edge for us. As well as needing one of the younger seamers to break into the side. At the moment we’re running the risk of having too many bath chairs for Breznan to push at once.
Eastbourne: Similar age demographic to the Yorkshire pace attack
The spinners found it much harder to find success this year, with the poor weather having a major effect. It wasn’t quite as simple as, April & May, dry as a bone, Rashid is our leading wicket-taker. June & beyond, help, my goldfish has drowned and I can’t buy a wicket. But it’s no coincidence that Adil took 21 wickets in our first four games, during the only part of the season that felt like summer, and 19 in the remaining eleven games. Even so, Adil did take 40 wickets – the most by a Yorkshire spinner for over a decade – so given dryer pitches in 2008, you’d expect to see his bowling really start to develop.
Getting any turn from the shallow end?
The season as a whole was a familiar tale of our inability to capitalise on a great start. How many times have we said that over the last forty years? Three wins in the first four games, and huge wins at that, were followed by a period of several months when we could barely get on the pitch for more than two days out of four. Looking back now, you wonder if we shouldn’t have taken a leaf out of the Shane Warne play book and tried to engineer a result with declarations. At the time, collecting bonus points was keeping us in the hunt, but in reality we were picking up injuries, having players run out of form and allowing our momentum to ebb away. Then again, perhaps we just got stuffed by the weather?
All that’s left of this year, is to make a wish list of things for next. Better weather, an overseas bowler in his prime, a consistent opening partnership and the courage to risk defeat in the pursuit of victory.
Here’s to a winter not spent arguing with ourselves. Some hope!
Si’thee next season,
Len
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