IT is likely to be well into the New Year before Yorkshire County Cricket Club's deal to buy Headingley is signed and sealed.

Recent claims in one newspaper that Yorkshire have been on the verge of completing the purchase of the cricket ground have proved wide of the mark.

It is believed that Yorkshire need to raise around £15m to buy the ground once talks with Headingley's owners, Leeds Cricket, Football and Athletic Company, have been completed.

Club president Robin Smith said: "The deal may be clinched before Christmas but the logistics will take longer than that. There are only seven working weeks left before Christmas and it will be into the New Year before everything is in place."

Yorkshire stated at their annual meeting in March that they hoped they would be in a position to buy the ground by June but that date came and went, as did others which appeared in some sections of the media.

In September, I reported exclusively in the Evening Press that the ground purchase continued to be subjected to delays and that there was no sign of it taking place over the next few weeks.

Once a deal has been agreed, Yorkshire will still need to call an extraordinary general meeting to gain the approval of the members and with this taking three weeks there would seem to be little chance of it being held before February at the earliest.

The club may take up Terry Rooney's racist jibes with his Bradford North constituency Labour Party chairman if he does not make a full apology for his remarks.

And long-time Yorkshire member Geoff Holmes, from Idle, near Bradford,who is one of Rooney's constituents, says that he is "incandescent with rage" at his MP's claims that the county club is guilty of "deep-rooted, embedded racism".

After Rooney had made his allegations in the House of Commons, Smith this week wrote to him demanding an apology.

"If Mr Rooney refuses to apologise I will regard that as confrontational and highly unsatisfactory," said Smith.

"I would certainly not allow the matter to drop and there are several courses of action to consider, one of them being to report his remarks to his constituency chairman and also acquaint him with the correspondence I have sent to Mr Rooney.

"Yorkshire and its members have been hurt and offended by his comments and we will accept nothing short of an apology."

Updated: 10:29 Friday, November 05, 2004