Time for Yorkshire to kickstart Championship season

“THERE are going to be no easy games”... “I’ve never seen a game played on paper before”... “The Second Division is tough to get out of”... “There are a lot of good teams”... And so on.

Ottis Gibson, pictured, went through the gamut of truisms on the Yorkshire website in the buildup to the match against Derbyshire at Headingley that starts today, one which – given a fair wind and favourable weather – his team will be expected to win nine times out of 10.

Matters are rarely so straightforward in professional sport, of course, which explains why bookmakers are invariably the biggest winners – and with those bookmakers having pretty much to an organisation tipped Yorkshire to run away with the league, the pressure is on.

The season has not started well – two draws, one weather affected at home to Leicestershire, the other not helped by an absurdly cautious declaration when Gloucestershire were set 498 to win at Bristol (there have been only two higher chases in the circa 22,000 Championship matches ever played), was followed by a six-wicket defeat to Middlesex at Lord’s.

Consequently, Yorkshire sit second-bottom of Division Two – level on points with Derbyshire, whose first match at home to Gloucestershire was totally washed out before they drew against Glamorgan in Cardiff and then escaped with a draw in a rain-ruined affair at home to Leicestershire.

Yorkshire achieved two of their three victories last year against Derbyshire (at Chesterfield and Scarborough), with their opponents not having won in the tournament since July 2022.

Since then, Derbyshire have had five defeats, 12 draws and their recent abandonment.

Statistically, if not in actuality, they are struggling even to make up the numbers.

Yorkshire, then, are on the proverbial hiding to nothing but this is the perfect opportunity to get their season up and running.

Along with Shan Masood, once of the Peakites’ parish, they have England’s Joe Root and Harry Brook available, plus a former Test player in Adam Lyth.

At Lord’s, the Yorkshire “Big Four” improbably aggregated a mere 95 runs between them in eight innings. The chances of them struggling collectively twice in succession would seem as improbable as a UFO landing on the outfield, although stranger things have happened at Yorkshire in the last two-and-a-half years.

Now it needs to be back to basics – the tried-and-trusted method of scoring big first innings runs and taking 20 wickets.

The batting should not be a problem but Yorkshire have struggled to kill teams off with the ball; indeed, they have won only four of their last 30 Championship games since the start of the 2022 season if you discount the abandonment at Gloucestershire last April.

Of course, Gibson is right – there are no easy games, and no Championship match has ever been played on a sheet of A4.

But now is the time for Yorkshire to stand up and show that their favourites’ tag is not one of those rare occasions when the bookmakers get things wrong.