Tykes lack bottle

To be without Test stars Darren Gough, Michael Vaughan and Craig White for much of the time and still to finish third in the Championship and runners-up in the National League was an achievement made even more remarkable by having one of the longest injury lists in years.

They would have been second in the Championship, too, but for the docking of eight points for preparing a 'poor' pitch against Surrey at Scarborough, a penalty which left them seething with anger - and £50,000 the poorer in prize money.

But the most frustrating aspect of the season was that Yorkshire were often at their worst when close to their strongest and the most bitter disappointments came with their failure to get anywhere near Lord's in either the Benson and Hedges Cup or the NatWest Trophy.

Their B&H quarter-final defeat by arch rivals Surrey at Headingley, and their exit to Northamptonshire at Wantage Road in the NatWest, showed that Yorkshire still all too often bottle it when the real pressure is on.

Yet they are to be greatly admired for competing on all fronts, setting their sights high in both one-day and first class cricket, and it is a commendable achievement to be one of only four counties who by next season will still never have played outside the First Division of either the Championship or National League.

While everyone regrets that Gough and White were virtually strangers to Yorkshire during the summer their absence along with the injury crisis meant that opportunities had to be given to younger players and names emerged which had hardly been heard of before.

When, if ever, have Yorkshire given debut appearances to TEN youngsters in the same season?

On to the Championship stage walked Vic Craven, Simon Widdup, Simon Guy, Gary Ramsden, Chris Elstub and Greg Lambert while Michael Lumb, Scott Richardson, John Inglis and Lesroy Weekes were all given a game against either the Zimbabweans or the West Indians.

Of these, Guy would seem to have taken the wicketkeeping gloves off Richard Blakey permanently, Craven and Widdup have shown fine temperaments without yet making large amounts of runs, and Lumb and Richardson have demonstrated such good form in the second team that they are bound to be knocking hard on the door next year.

A study of Yorkshire's results in all forms of cricket during 2000 will reveal their mercurial nature because they generally either won easily or lost by large margins, but two players never less than outstanding were Darren Lehmann and Matthew Hoggard, who made enormous contributions, without which Yorkshire would indeed have struggled.

The Australian once again showed that he is a world class performer who makes batting look like child's play and his consistency was such, particularly in the Championship, that he rarely knew the meaning of the word failure.

In 23 Championship innings, Lehmann rapped out four centuries and ten other half-centuries in piling up 1,477 runs to make himself the top run-scorer in the country in first class cricket, shrugging off his mainly Aussie rivals for the crown.

Playing in all 16 Championship matches, Lehmann missed out on a half-century in only three of them and in no game did he contribute fewer than 39 runs.

In addition, his 100 off 89 balls against Kent at Canterbury was the fastest century of the season and it earned him the Walter Lawrence Trophy and a cheque for £1,000.

The truly astonishing fact is that Lehmann could well have had a further eight or nine centuries because on most occasions after reaching 50 it was only his own audaciousness that prevented him from completing three figures, bowlers being unable to take any credit for the vast majority of his dismissals.

One of the wiser things Yorkshire did towards the end of the campaign was to extend Lehmann's contract to three years from the start of next season and to appoint him vice-captain.

David Byas, re-appointed captain for 2001 will then be in his sixth year in charge, and this great servant of Yorkshire cricket is unlikely to want to stay at the helm after that, particularly if there are few signs of getting out of the rut of poor form that has affected him for the past couple of seasons.

If Yorkshire would have struggled without Lehmann, the same can be said of Hoggard, poles apart from his Aussie team-mate by birth, but in the same backyard in terms of value and achievement for the White Rose side.

Pudsey-reared Hoggard, who I tipped for the top right from the start, came to the attention of the England selectors with a dynamic televised exhibition of fast bowling in the B&H match against Surrey when his distinguished scalps were Mark Butcher, Alistair Brown, Graham Thorpe and Adam Hollioake.

England chairman of selectors David Graveney was quick to reveal that Hoggard was near to the front of the queue for a Test place and when he finally made it against the West Indies at Lord's it meant he was capped by England before his county, who eventually got round to giving him his colours at Scarborough in late July.

While fast bowling colleagues broke down all around him, Hoggard kept ploughing on, not only becoming the team's sole bowler to take 50 first class wickets but also smashing Howard Cooper's 1975 record for Yorkshire of 29 wickets in a season of county league cricket.

Hoggard finished up with 37 wickets in the coloured clothing competition at an incredible average of 12.37 runs apiece to leave him the country's leading wicket-taker.

It was figures like these which this week convinced England that Hoggard, already chosen for the Test tours of Pakistan and Sri Lanka, was the man to replace the injured Alan Mullally in the three series of one-day internationals over the winter.

Apart from Lehmann, Yorkshire's only other batsman to hit consistently high form was Michael Vaughan who plundered 155 in the opening match against Derbyshire before breaking a bone in his hand which caused him to miss the next three Championship games and the Test series with Zimbabwe.

But Vaughan went on to cement his England place with some stylish and courageous innings against the West Indies and at county level he showed a consistency often lacking in previous seasons while being as elegant as ever.

Gavin Hamilton recorded his maiden century early doors against Hampshire at Headingley and an excellent all-round season would have been even better but for a period out with injury.

Anthony McGrath, absent for the first half of the summer with knee problems, went on to show he still has pedigree, but Matthew Wood trailed off badly after a promising start and Richard Blakey's batting was not good enough for him to hold on to his place.

Chris Silverwood had a summer he will want to forget, being injured at the start and the end and in between never finding the form that he so badly needed to win favour with England again - although they have indicated their faith in him by picking him for the A tour of the West Indies.

It was much the same with Paul Hutchison but his left-arm swing rival Ryan Sidebottom enjoyed spectacular success in mid-season with 22 wickets in four Championship matches, including 11 for 43 against Kent at Headingley, the cheapest 11- wicket haul since George Macaulay claimed 11 for 34 against Northamptonshire at Kettering in 1933.

Sidebottom received his county cap at Scarborough in July but only after sustaining a hip injury on the opening day of the Somerset match and that was the end of his season.

There was good news for him this week, however, when, like Silverwood, he learned that a place has been reserved for him on the A tour of the West Indies.

Spinners Ian Fisher and James Middlebrook both did respectably well with limited opportunities and Middlebrook finished off with a bang at Southampton by grabbing career-best figures of ten for 170.

All-rounder Gary Fellows kept his place throughout the season, producing some cameo innings without ever achieving anything more substantial.

All in all, it was very encouraging to see how well Yorkshire could acquit themselves without their celebrity players but to make a big impact in 2001 they really must cut down on all those injuries.