Struggling to change gear…
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Championship: Yorkshire v Durham – Headingley, 29th June – 1st July
There are any number of things wrong with the fixture list for the county season. No set day of the week for Championship games to start. Four-day matches scheduled to finish on a Saturday, so any side strong enough at home to win inside three days looses vital weekend revenue. And of course the perennial favourite: bank holidays when there’s no cricket anywhere north of the Wash.
In fact, if you sat down to write a list of the cricket season’s idiosyncratic scheduling cock-ups you’d end up with a book just about the right size and weight to beat some sense into the ECB bean counters. Even if it didn’t, you’d still have a hell of a lot of fun taking out your frustration on people too dumb to realise that starting championship and second eleven games so close together, results in junior pros risking life and limb by having to drive like the clappers down the motorway once they’re relived of twelfth man duties.
The mythical one man and his dog (minus the dog now of course) plus several thousand others who Bob Willis and Micheal Atherton refuse to believe exist.
Another of the problems the schedule throws up is the lack of time sides have to prepare for switching from championship cricket to 20/20 and back again. A couple of days aren’t much to get ready for a form of cricket you haven’t played for nearly a year with the same being true for getting out of 20/20 mode and preparing for the different kind of concentration needed in the longer form of the game. It’s a difficult transition to make and some sides handle it better than others. Yorkshire barely seem to handle it at all.
This year was a perfect example, with our 20/20 campaign starting with all the comfort of a rickshaw suddenly finding itself in the fast line of a motorway. It wasn’t until the third game before we seemed to have settled into the rhythm of the format, with our best performance saved for the last match before we switched back to first class cricket again.
And what a return to the championship it turned out to be. Executed with all the balance and poise of a drunk emerging from an all night bar into the dazzling sunlight.
Wanging it down
The start of this game was one of those typical, four seasons in three sessions, days, that Headingley seem to specialise in. You know the ones, the days when you walk back to the car park hoping your arms aren’t too sunburnt to dig your Vauxhall out of the snowdrift.
Not that the opening day was our real problem, as despite being bowled out for 184, three quick wickets left Durham at 59-3 overnight and the match fairly evenly poised. A balance that was retained throughout the following morning with a steady chipping away at the Durham batting order reducing them to 161/7.
But from there on, Durham simply pulled further and further away from us. We just didn’t seem to have got back our championship mindset. It was like watching a sprinter competing in the 1500 meters against a quality middle-distance runner. The further we went, the easier it was for Durham to ease away from us. By the end, what had started as a close run contest, almost ended with us being lapped.
Vivien and Geoff’s bookstall: Worth more to Yorkshire supporters than a hundred Allen Stanford’s
It’s hard to take much out of this game, beyond the thought that if 20/20 cricket is ever introduced into this country in a league that runs throughout the summer, we’re going to have to learn how to switch between the differing formats a lot better than we do now.
But there were some positives, with Brezzy taking his first five-for in ages. Add him to Hoggy (who didn’t have a great match, but only an idiot would drop him on that basis) and the seamers returning from injury, and our attack should be much stronger for the coming games. Plus of course, we may have seen Adam “insane genius” Lyth finally finding his feet at this level. That would be a major plus to take from the match as Adam is not only a fine batsman, but also one of the best fielders in the country. With his natural athleticism married to a frame so slim, when he turns sideways he disappears from vision. A “Stealth” cover point is a great asset to have. The US military spent billions developing that kind of technology and Adam can reproduce it just with a high metabolism and queuing behind the senior pro’s for the desert trolley.
You’ve also got to put the game into perspective. That perspective being that Durham are a damn fine side, one equipped to challenged in all the competitions and one that at the moment, is looking a lot stronger than we are. Bit of a shame we play the buggers so often really…
Si’thee later,
Len
(Match photos: By kind permission of Dave Morton)
My Man of the Match: Adam Lyth
Result: Durham (20 points) Beat Yorkshire (3 points) by 8 wickets
For some reason I was able to listen to the match on line. The Yorks commentary team are a cheery lot of Yorkshire chauvinists, and it would have been a stony-hearted person who could listen to them deflating like leaky balloons as Plunky whacked Yorks around – and smiled to themselves. Unless of course you’re a Durham supporter…
I feel I should defend the Yorkshire commentary team at this point. I’m not actually going too do that, but I feel I should.
But do try to remember that their ability to precursor the fall of a Yorkshire wicket with confident assertions of impending milestones or appearances of solidity, almost certainly guaranteed your team success. What also stands in their favour, of course, was their ability to set up a contact yahoo email address in less than four weeks. It’s that technical mastery and lightening fast administrative know how that’s put Yorkshire where it is now; the county cricket club most likely to be parodied by Viz.