FIXTURES FOR 2020 REVEALED

Key dates for your diary for Yorkshire and the Northern Superchargers

SCARBOROUGH is to host a County Championship Roses match for the first time in almost 30 years and for only the third time in its history.

The North Marine Road ground will stage the game between Yorkshire and Lancashire from Sunday June 14 in the standout entry on the 2020 fixture list, released today.

It will be the first time that the Roses rivals have locked horns in a Championship game on the east coast since 1991, two years after their only previous Championship meeting at the venue.

Yorkshire’s director of cricket Martyn Moxon, who played in both matches and scored a hundred in the most recent one, said it promised to be “a fantastic occasion”.

“I played in Roses matches at Scarborough back in the day and it was a fantastic atmosphere,” he said. “To play Lancashire there is a real bonus for the Scarborough club, and hopefully we’ll get a big attendance.”

Yorkshire’s second Championship opponents at Scarborough are Warwickshire – one of four sides Yorkshire play only once in next year’s Championship due to further changes to its structure.

With 10 clubs in Division One and eight in Division Two, reversing the previous split, and 14 matches per club, it means that top-flight Yorkshire play five teams twice (Essex, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Lancashire and Surrey) and – in addition to Warwickshire - Kent, Northamptonshire and Somerset once. Promotion reverts to twoup, two-down.

Warwickshire’s visit to Scarborough in late August for the 134th Festival concludes a 46day period in which Yorkshire do not play a Championship match in the peak weeks of summer from the scheduled end of their fixture against Gloucestershire at Cheltenham on July 8, a venue where they have not played in the competition since 2003. That is because those weeks are taken out by The Hundred, which takes place from July 17 to August 15 and which runs alongside the 50over Cup.

With Headingley staging four matches in The Hundred (local franchise Northern Superchargers kick-off their eight-game campaign at Manchester Originals on July 18), Yorkshire are holding their four home 50over fixtures at Scarborough (versus Nottinghamshire and Warwickshire) and at York (versus Northamptonshire and Surrey).

York made an excellent impression last year when hosting Warwickshire in the Championship.

Yorkshire also visit Newport in the 50-over Cup when they take on Glamorgan on July

31; Yorkshire have only once previously played a firstteam match in that city, a Championship fixture in 1949. However, a scheduled Refuge Assurance League game there in 1990 was abandoned without a ball bowled.

Due to the focus on The Hundred and Twenty20, the Championship is again shoehorned into the margins of the season – Yorkshire play six matches before the end of May, and five from August 23.

They begin their Championship programme on Easter Sunday, April 12, against Gloucestershire at Headingley, and end it from September 22 against Surrey at the Oval.

Yorkshire’s T20 group campaign starts on May 29 and finishes on July 12, with the highprofile meetings with Lancashire taking place at Headingley on Thursday, June 4, and at Old Trafford on Friday, July 10.

T20 Finals Day is at Edgbaston on Saturday, September 5, while the 50-over final – moved from Lord’s to Trent Bridge as if to highlight the competition’s declining importance to the powers-that-be – is even later on Saturday, September 19.