A couple of weeks ago I took Darren Gough to task for misinterpreting media criticism over returning to England's side too soon as a personal attack upon himself.

But I felt very sorry for him on Monday as he cut a lone figure walking away from the Roses match with his gear slung over one shoulder and his cricket coffin trailing behind him.

His premature departure while the game was still in progress signalled the start of another spell on the sidelines while he builds up the strength in his right knee after two lots of surgery.

Perhaps Gough would be much fitter and stronger by now if England had not pushed too hard to get him on his feet for the NatWest Series of one-day internationals and then wanted to have him in the side for the first Test against India which began at Lord's on Thursday.

The longer Gough is out of regular action, the more he will worry about his fitness for next winter's Ashes tour and the World Cup which follows in South Africa, but rushing him back is no way to remedy the situation.

Gough was in something of a dilemma when he turned up at Yorkshire's team hotel in Chelmsford last week on the eve of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy quarter-final match with Essex which marked his first appearance of the season for his county.

Demotion to get Wood working

One of the saddest aspects of Yorkshire's sorry Championship season has been the batting form of Matthew Wood who only a year ago was on his way to 1,000 runs and about to be invited to attend the England Academy in Australia.

Now he can barely score a run and the time has arrived when he should be allowed to regain his confidence in the second team.

Nothing is going right for him at the moment and when a player is both out of luck and form the best thing for himself and the team is move out and give someone else a chance.

After his dismal Roses match in which he scored five and nought, it was surprising that he held his place for this week's game against Championship leaders Surrey at Guildford.

But when he was out to a brute of a ball from Ed Giddins in the first innings it gave him his fifth duck of the season and was the ninth time in 16 innings that he has failed to reach double figures.

At that stage of the match, Wood's run tally for the summer was 158 and his average had plummeted to 9.87.

With seven games still remaining, Wood should be replaced by either Scott Richardson or Chris Taylor, both of whom have been virtually ignored so far this season.

Each played in the curtain-raiser against Surrey at Headingley but neither has been seen since, despite Taylor scoring Yorkshire's only half-century in that match and showing a sound technique and solid defence.

Richardson, also, has every right to feel left out in the cold after being given a run last summer and then seemingly forgotten.

What makes it even more important that some of the younger players are given a go now that the team as a whole have flopped so badly is that club treasurer Peter Townend issued a stern warning at the annual meeting in March that Yorkshire would have to cut their playing staff later this year in order to save around £250,000 on cricket costs.

Such a threat has obviously made second teamers jittery about their future and I understand that there have been some mutterings from within the side about lack of opportunities.

It would certainly be wrong for batsmen with the potential of both Richardson and Taylor to be off-loaded without having been given a fair run.

And Yorkshire would look foolish if they released players who then went on to make a good impression with other counties.

Some of Yorkshire's recent decisions to let players go are open to the argument that they have shown poor judgement, James Middlebrook and Ian Fisher being two cases in point.

The NatWest Series had concluded a couple of days earlier and Gough had just driven from Sheffield after an appointment with his specialist for a progress report on his knee.

Ideally, Gough should have rested up for a few days following his exertions with England but he knew there was pressure on him to prove his fitness for the first Test and that he would have to do what others wanted.

He learned during the Yorkshire game at Chelmsford that he had been given the green light to play in the Roses match but the wiser course of action might have been for him to wait until this week's Championship encounter with Surrey at Guildford.

That, of course, would have meant he could not play for England at Lord's but it could have resulted in him being fully fit for the second Test at Trent Bridge on August 8 which he will now have to sit out.

England are so obsessed with their own way of doing things these days that they seem to have completely forgotten that if a player is injured the best way to bring him back to full fitness is gradually through the county system.

It is ludicrous to expect Gough or any other player who has not experienced first class cricket since the previous season suddenly to be given a single Championship match in the belief that it will make him fit for a five-day Test the following week.

England ought to have left Gough out of the NatWest Series and let him build himself up through playing for Yorkshire Seconds and then coming into the first team for at least a couple of games.

It all goes back to the original criticism which was not aimed specifically at Gough but at England for losing sight of the best way to look after a player during the recovery stages of a serious injury.

Not everything turned out bleak for Gough in the Roses match, however, and he showed that his old fighting spirit was still there when he won his long-awaited duel with former captain David Byas.

The differences between the two have been built up out of all proportion but it made for good theatre and neither man is the sort to have backed away from the confrontation.

Nothing could have made Gough put more into his first Championship bowl for Yorkshire in almost a year than the sight of Byas at the other end and his appetite had already been sharpened by knocking back the stumps of Lancashire opener Mark Chilton.

Gough beat Byas with one or two really quick deliveries but the left-hander hit back with three crisp shots off the back foot for fours before The Dazzler got one to hurry through low and smack into Byas's middle stump.

It was not the happiest of returns to his old stamping ground for Byas who early in the match appeared to catch Matthew Wood, who was given not out because the umpires were unsighted. Byas then committed the cardinal sin of dropping Darren Lehmann, the Australian taking advantage of his escape on 22 by going on to plunder a breathtaking 187.

Updated: 11:47 Saturday, July 27, 2002