Lancashire v Yorkshire – Old Trafford, 10^th June

Yorkshire won by 2 wickets

[Scorecard]

Six spinners. Top score 34. Old school cricket.

Lancashire batting woeful. Yorkshire little better, until Rafiq’s calm nerves Dilscoop victory.

Headingley, Leeds – England’s now traditional mid-summer 2020 season may be set for a radical shake-up following today’s announcement by Yorkshire that they’re to host a special “cricket themed” 2020 game later this month. The match, which is being billed as “2020 but not as you know it”, will feature players dressed in all white and is scheduled to last four days.

“2020 is all about innovation,” explained Yorkshire’s head of marketing, Doug Septum, “We wanted to try something a bit different to catch the public’s imagination, and what could be more different to 2020 than a game of cricket?”

“We’re keen to make the experience as authentic as possible, so we’ll have minimal advertising for the event and plan to schedule it mid-week so as few people as possible can attend,” continued Septum, “We’ve asked the ECB for their co-operation and they’ve agreed to make our England players unavailable by organising a Lions’ hydrotherapy get together at the same time. It all builds up that unique county cricket atmosphere of neglected disinterest from the games administrators.”

It’s understood that Yorkshire have also been given permission to experiment with a red ball, no walk on music and two tactical timeouts, lasting 40 and 20 minutes each.

Yorkshire’s head of professional cricket, Martyn Moxon, remains sceptical however, “I understand the club’s need to find ways of generating extra revenue, but playing a cricket game in the middle of the 2020 season is just crazy. How am I supposed to prepare the squad for such a radical change of gear? Some of them won’t have played a defensive shot for weeks, let alone practised slip catching. And that’s without mentioning the difficulty we had getting two sets of plastic dugouts up the stairs and through dressing room doors. Frankly it’s just a gimmick.”

But despite those reservations, it seems some things will remain unchanged. “It’s still being billed as a 2020 fixture,” explained Harold Grimdyke, operator of Yorkshire supporter site battingforadraw.com, “so I expect Yorkshire will lose the match as usual. That’s a 2020 tradition I can’t see being altered.”

Yorkshire’s four day 2020 match against Durham at Headlingly is scheduled to start on June 23^rd.

In related news: Surrey has cancelled their own darts themed night featuring Phil “The Power” Taylor and glamorous walk on girls. “It was a great idea,” insisted a spokesman for the club, “but the costs were eating into the budget for next week’s half-time pole dancing display.”

Yorkshire v Worcs – Headingley, 9^th June

Yorkshire won by 2 runs

[Scorecard]

No sixes for Yorkshire. Four from Andrew, but Ryan keeps it tight; Rashid, Pyrah, take the wickets.

Yorkshire win? *faints*

Chemlsford on the opening day of the season - (c) Paul Frame

As the championship has been put on hold while we watch the Twenty20 cup, Len has asked me to review Essex’s season so far. Today I’ll focus on the batting.

The Good.

On the face of things there hasn’t been all that much to celebrate about our batting in the first half of the season, but upon reflection I remembered that hope has given me one or two items as a keepsake.

The first has been Alastair Cook’s successful start to the summer. So many England players have returned back to their counties and come a cropper through injury & loss of form this season (Bresnan, Shahzad, Yardy, Wright) but Cook’s ongoing test form has been proof that county cricket is still providing players of genuine quality for England. Granted his 502 runs at 42 haven’t set the championship alight, but when you consider some of the opening bowlers knocking around Division 2 at the moment (Cook has faced James Harris, Chris Tremlett, Steven Finn, Corey Collymore & some bloke called Vaas) averaging 42 in April & May is nothing to be sniffed at.

Ravi Bopara has been the centre of much debate throughout the season. His form since playing at Derby for Essex has been woeful, yet he’s passed 50 three times and converted two of those to hundreds. In 13 championship innings he’s scored as many centuries as the rest of the top seven have managed in 89. If they could learn from this, then that pre-season promotion talk might not have been so daft after all.

Graham Napier’s record equaling 196 - (c) Paul Frame

It would be remiss of me not to mention Graham Napier’s 196 at Whitgift against Surrey. I’d gone down to watch the first day & was rewarded by seeing Cook, Walker & Wheater scoring half-centuries and slowly dragging Essex to a reasonably secure first-day total. When Napier went out to bat late on the first day, he was watchful & compact, his batting exuded calm to an Essex supporter who’d seen our tail knocked over all too frequently this season. Hamilton-Brown summoned Chris Tremlett into the attack to dispose of Napier, who proceeded to play cautiously at first and then square drive a length ball from Tremlett over cover for six. The cheer that I let out wasn’t appreciated by the Surrey fans but the following day’s commentary on the carnage that he wreaked upon Croydon shall live long in the memory.

The Bad.

The top seven have already passed 50 twenty-six times, but only four of those half-centuries have been converted into hundreds. Collectively then, the batting has misfired and made our chances of promotion that much harder by forcing the bowlers to strain for wickets, rather than just applying pressure and letting good bowling work us into a position to win games.

The lack of enough long innings of real substance didn’t matter so much last year as we had the second-best leg-spinner in the world playing for us. With leg-spin comes turn (normally) on a first-day pitch and is an attacking weapon from the start. This year the batsmen haven’t helped the orthodox spin of Tim Phillips by getting out cheaply and denying him the chance to be an attacking option on a fourth-day pitch.

Owais Shah & Ryan Ten Doeschate’s absence from the first six games of the championship because of the IPL denied us the chance of fielding a batting line-up that had 26 international centuries to their name at the start of the summer. Gloucestershire was the first game after their return from the IPL and it’s no co-incidence that we made a marked improvement in that game and would have been in a strong position to win, had the weather not intervened. Simply put, without them in the side, promotion looked remote, with them in the side, our chances are immeasurably improved.

The Ugly

Six first-innings leads conceded in eight matches. Billy Goddleman’s average (15) opening the batting. Matt Walker having a word with the top-order about how Darren Stevens was yet to take a five-for in 170 first-class matches and their deciding to have a whip-round to give him career-best match figures of 9-136 (a night out at the Sugar Hut would have been funnier guys surely?) The list could go on & on…

My final, really ugly point: We’re 13 points behind Surrey having played one more game than them.

Bugger.

Words and photos, (c) Paul Frame 2011 – Click on images for full size

Currently the author of this article is unemployed; if you don’t wish to read any more missives from him, please find it in your heart to employ him.

Yorkshire halfway through the season – Batting

Remember when Yorkshire member’s biggest grumble was Rudolph ‘being wasted’ as an opener? He was averaging around fifty at the time. God, I miss those days.

Now there are so many things for supporters to moan about, they don’t know where to start, don’t know when to stop. Add ct Bairstow b Sidebottom to that general disquiet and sitting in the stands it can feel like the 80’s all over again. We’ll be living under an austere Tory government next. I wonder if they can trim some of the unnecessary fat off Anthony McGrath? Someone needs to. And someone needs to do something, anything, to get our season back on track again.  At the moment we’ve diverged so far from the recommended route we’re in danger of getting bogged down in relegation country.

The biggest worry before the summer started was once again Jacques Rudolph; this time his absence and how we’d cope with it.

Now we all know the arguments about overseas players: they increase the quality of our domestic cricket, but, amongst other things, teammates can allow them to shoulder too much responsibility rather than taking it on themselves.

In Rudolph’s case he was often the man who played the long innings, made the big score, the one that set up a game. So it appeared anyway. Yet look back and compare the first half of this championship campaign with the strong start we made last year and it’s the downturn in output from other batsmen that’s more of a problem. As for all Rudolph’s weight of runs last year, the rest of our batting contributed strongly right down the order.

Not so this summer.

Our problems start at the top, with Sayers suffering a stuttering season – making fifty then getting out in one innings, being dismissed in single figures in the next. A recurring pattern. He’s a man returning from serious illness of course, but to be completely dispassionate, his has been a frustrating, ‘almost but not quite got going’ season. Similarly Lyth, who punctuates his confident stroke play with too many loose shots; full stops that have turned the match winning innings of 2010 into the cameos of 2011.

The middle order has problems of its own. McGrath has been hampered by sciatica, poor form and a lack of mobility in the field; a worrying combination for a player who should be leading the batting as its senior pro, but instead can no longer be considered an automatic selection. Brophy and Gale have played one great innings each, but underperformed otherwise. Whilst the critical positions of seven and eight are occupied by an out of form Adil Rashid and, at times, Ryan Sidebottom. Not a combination to provide the lower order stability of previous seasons.

It’s significant, but perhaps not coincidental, that our three most reliable batsmen are also the three youngest. In a season where we’ve returned to the batting collapses of 2009, Root and Ballance have no mental scars from that time, whilst Jonny Bairstow has shown on numerous occasions since making the first team that he has a rare temperament, giving the impression of being able to thread the eye of a needle in circumstances where other men would be developing shell-shock. His continued development into a batsman of substance, one now capable of lengthy innings, is the highlight of the season.

But young players finding their feet quickly aren’t enough to stop inconsistency from more experienced colleagues creating an unreliable whole, with the batting collapses Yorkshire thought they’d put behind them in 2010 returning once again. There’ve been some shockers too, 100/2 to 149 all out at home to Durham, skittled for 86 in the following game against Notts and slumping from 95/2 to 141 all out at Liverpool, being particular low-lights. Little wonder that when we’ve found ourselves in a position to dominate with the bat, all too often we’ve lacked the confidence to score at an aggressive enough pace.

How we reverse the situation is hard to say, as there seems to be no silver bullet solution, only hard work to recover form. Certainly the fixation with Rudolph has to stop. He’s gone, and unless Colin Graves decides to dig further into pockets already underwriting a £20m debt, he’s not going to be replaced from outside. Instead we should reflect that if those still at the club had retained last year’s form we’d be praising the way Root and Ballance had stepped up and eased concerns over Jacques departure.

It’s that collective failure to continue last summer’s form that’s at the heart of our batting problems this year, not the failure to replace Rudolph.

Len

Coming next, Part 2 – the bowling

Notts v Yorkshire – Trent Bridge, 5^th June

Nottinghamshire won by 53 runs

[Scorecard]

Voges’ precision, Patel and Read’s power hitting, set daunting target.

Pitch flat, Yorkshire batting flatter.

Make final’s day? No chance!

Todmorden in the sun

Unicorns ‘A’  290 for 8 (40 overs) beat Yorkshire 2^nd XI  121 (all out) by 169 runs.

For a Yorkshire supporter looking for encouragement after the events at Taunton and Hove, this was a major disappointment. The sun shone, the ball was pink, and Todmorden is one of my favourite grounds in the entire world – but this young Yorkshire team was never in the game, not after an opening assault by James Ord, who went on to make 97.

George Ross spins the pink ball

On reflection, it is unreasonable to expect an organisation which has so recently given us the likes of  Lyth, Bairstow, Ballance, Root, Rafiq and Ashraf still to have unmined riches waiting in the wings. There is bound to be a vacuum to fill, and this will take time.

[The above paragraph is our entry for the 2011 All England Mixed Metaphor Competition. We are confident of a podium place.]

Back to the cricket. The score when I arrived was 40 for 1 off 5 overs, and the only recent graduate who was playing, Ollie H-D, was one of the bowlers getting stick from the impressive Ord. Ollie did not suffer as badly as his opening partner, though, who kept getting driven out of the ground and into the adjoining park.

Some semblance of control was exerted by the experienced John Blain and by Lee Hodgson’s changes of pace, but the only bowler who looked like a future 1^st Class cricketer was left-arm spinner Gurman Randhawa.

Gurman Randhawa bowling

I was however impressed by the wicket-keeping of young Ed Wilson; another one for the future, perhaps.

Wicket-Keeper Ed Wilson

Any hopes that Yorkshire might make a game of it were dashed by an early clatter of wickets, 17 for 4 midway through the 7^th over. To be honest there seemed to be a yawning gulf between the teams, with dodgy Yorkshire techniques unable to cope with experienced bowling.

Wilson, at least, looked to have a proper method, and so did Alex Lilley, who top-scored with 45. And that was just about that. A record losing margin, apparently.

Alex Lilley made 45

(Click on match photos for full size)

YCCC official site, report and scorecard

Dave Morton 2011

Yorkshire v Warwickshire – Headingley, 3^rd June

Warwickshire won by 5 wickets

(13 balls remaining)

[Scorecard]

95/2 at halfway slumps to 161/8. Well shy of a defendable total. Yup, that’ll be Yorkshire’s season in a nutshell…

No mind-stretching insights from me, from these pictures, but just one or two thoughts.

The grace and balance of the two main protagonists. Monty may be a cumbersome fieldsman, but his bowling is lovely to watch and the ball seems to get above the batsman’s eye-level. No early movement from Joe, no fashionable forward press – pick up the bat, assess the line and length, play the stroke.

Simples (if you’re talented).

Slip is interesting. Hands on knees, then they briefly come together, but are apart again just at the vital moment. Not good, I’d suggest.

Short-leg and wicket-keeper have both stayed down well, but in Hodd’s case this is misleading. He had a shocking match.

And just to be mischievous, bearing in mind what happened later in the day, Kettleborough’s index finger is nowhere to be seen.

(Click on image for full-size, use navigation arrows, then click again to close)

Dave Morton, 2011

And so Yorkshire’s God awful road trip comes to an end. Fifteen days that have included a Roses thrashing at Liverpool, yet another humiliation at Taunton and a narrow escape from an innings defeat on the south coast. Not quite the worst fortnight in the clubs long history, but far from being it’s best.

There was some consolation at least from the final day at Hove, with the team showing resolve and determination to bat out ninety odd overs and save a match that had looked all but lost just twenty-four hours before. That’s great, heartening even, but can we please stop getting ourselves into such hopeless looking situations in the first place? Because taken overall, this was another desperately poor performance from a squad with far more ability than they’re showing at present.

Joe Root b Parnell 70

Whether our team selection for this match was part of the problem or merely a distraction is debatable. But there were certainly a couple of interesting choices made – and by interesting, I mean for many supporters they’ll be completely baffling.

I mentioned in my last match report that given his record at the ground, and the current form of Adil Rashid, David Wainwright should be the first spinner picked to play at Hove, and that if he didn’t get a chance here, he should start looking for another club. There’s been nothing during the past four days to change my mind about that.

I’m not saying the nine wicket, ninety-nine run performance I saw him put in during the same fixture a couple of years ago would have been replicated, but given Adil’s just got carted for one of the worst bowling returns in the county’s history, it’s hard to see how Wainwright wouldn’t have been an improvement.

Lyth’s omission for the returning Sayers is perhaps more understandable. The reasons given by Gale were that Adam keeps making starts before getting out to loose strokes – something we’ve all witnessed this season – and that despite numerous discussions, no improvement was being seen. It was made to sound like a ‘kick up the backside’ demotion; which is fair enough. But how you justify dropping Lyth when Mags has been in far worse form is less clear. Lyth at least looks one innings away from making his season click. McGrath’s fluency seems further on the horizon, although forty odd on in the second innings here may have gone some way to rectifying that.

Even so, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Wainwright and Lyth were incredibly unlucky to have been omitted, and, as it turned out, Rashid unlucky to have played.

Of course, Adil wasn’t the only bowler to suffer during Sussex’s mammoth first innings 548/4 declared. Collectively it’s one of our worst performances in the field for some time. But hard as it is to gauge just how much of a hangover Yorkshire took into this game from Taunton, having conceded the thick end of 800 runs for just four wickets in the space of few days, confidence amongst the bowlers can hardly be sky high.

Which begs the question why our two most expensive bowlers, Shahzad and Rashid, were made to bowl so many overs. Adil in particular was left on whilst he was being given some fearful stick. Last year I praised the way Gale let Adil bowl a long spell at Canterbury to work his way through some poor early season form; but this felt more like a process that would knock down confidence rather than build it up. Heaven knows where this leaves us with a bowler who should have been our trump card in the coming 2020. Heaven knows where this leaves us with an attack that now looks even more of a worry than our batting.

Andrew Gale b Panesar 26

Oh yes, our batting. The underperformance continues, with the senior players being the main culprits. Once again they failed in the first innings. Once again it was the youngsters and lower order that bailed us out. Almost exactly half the runs we scored in this match came from Root, Bairstow and Ballance; 20, 21 and 21 respectively. With the half century from Steve Patterson in the first innings showing what should have been possible in reply to Sussex if we could cut out these mini-collapses we keep having. I could go on, but frankly I’m boring myself, and probably you as well, by describing the same failings over and over again.

The final day batting performance does show there are fighting qualities to Yorkshire’s squad, but the break for 2020 season couldn’t have come sooner. As at the moment the frailties of our batting are matched only by the lack of confidence shown by our attack.

We’ve got just over two weeks and half a dozen T20 games to regroup and prepare for the next championship match at the Riverside. Given Durham’s improving form, perhaps not the ideal fixture to get our season back on the rails.

Result: Sussex (10 points) drew with Yorkshire (5 points)

My Man of the Match: Murray Goodwin

[Scorecard]

Si’thee later,

Len

Steve Patterson, career best

(Match Photos by kind permission: Dave Morton. Click on image for full size)

Imagine being Shahid Afridi. Go on, imagine it. Not literally being him, you could lose yourself in the insanity, but ‘being him’ like in that Charlie Kaufman movie.

So imagine you’ve found a passageway hidden behind a filing cabinet at work, you’ve put aside the surveyors report the mortgage department are jumping up and down about, crawled through into the darkness, and, whoosh, out you pop at the other side, straight into Shahid Afridi’s thinking hole.

Fuckin’ mess in there isn’t it?

Well, think yourself lucky. Some poor bugger from accounts has wandered into the stationary cupboard not realising it’s a portal into Ijaz Butt’s mind. He really is screwed. It’s only a matter of time before he’s accusing the IT department of being giant lizards with no understanding of the lbw law.

But you. You’ve only got to cope with the contradictions and confusion of being Pakistan’s most predictable unpredictable cricketer. Because that’s what Afridi is. I mean, who can honestly say they were completely surprised by his resignation?

Coach and captain disagree over selection. Captain gets sacked by board. Former captain refuses to play until board is replaced. It’s a story as old as Pakistani cricket itself. Their equivalent of girl falls for boy. Boy drunkenly tries it on with girl’s sister. Girl won’t take boy back unless he stops suggesting they bowl the wrong ‘un occasionally.

But what comes next is less certain. We all know what should happen. The current, utterly incompetent, PCB board should resign and Afridi return to doing what he does best; hitting two monster sixes before holing out at deep extra cover.

Because for all Afridi’s faults he’s worth ten of Ijaz Butt.

Sure he’s done some monumentally stupid things. But at least scuffing up the pitch and biting the match ball were acts of isolated idiocy, easily spotted, easily punished. Far removed from the premeditated Machiavellian intent of spot fixing, the insidious spread of which has often been blocked by Afridi’s presence in the Pakistan side.

When did Ijaz Butt ever prove to be that effective?

When did he ever launch the ball into the crowd just because he could?

When did he inspire Pakistan to a 2020 crown that lifted the entire nation’s spirits?

When did anyone ever dream of ‘being Ijaz Butt’?

So England won at Cardiff. The most incredible Test victory since the last incredible Test victory.

Right now the sound of journalists furiously re-writing copy is drowning out England’s celebrations. Whilst in the away dressing room, Sri Lanka considers a formal complaint after they were denied a Max Mobile Timeout during their second innings collapse.

Let’s not judge that innings too harshly, though. Sure it could have been sponsored by the makers of Jenga but they did score at 3.32 runs per over. Take note, Jonathan Trott, that’s how you play a modern Test innings.

But let’s spare a thought for the real loser today.

Ian Bell.

How pissed off must he be? As another ill-judged, overly conservative, declaration by his captain denied him an extra hour and a half’s batting against a demoralised Sri Lankan attack. Doesn’t Strauss care about his batsmen’s averages? What the hell did he think he needed 50 overs for? England may have been down to three bowlers but that was at least two more than Sri Lanka had.

Now, if you’ll forgive me, I’m looking forward to tonight’s Test highlights. England win, Bob Willis’ commentary displays all the emotion of a ZX81 loading screen, and the Sri Lankan Innings is being shown as a blooper reel.

Si’thee later,

Len