The decision by Yorkshire this week to axe Richard Blakey from the Championship match against Somerset at Taunton and replace him with 21-year-old Simon Guy was one of the biggest selection shocks in a long while.

Rarely, if ever, can a club have ditched their wicketkeeper when he can boast more first class dismissals behind the stumps than anyone else in the country.

At the end of the Roses match, Blakey had held on to 38 catches in Championship cricket this season and had carried out two stumpings in addition to holding three catches in the match against Zimbabwe.

To claim 43 dismissals altogether in just a dozen matches is a great achievement and Blakey would no doubt have held on to his crown as top wicketkeeper for the remainder of the season if he had kept on playing on a regular basis.

There is bound to be sadness when Yorkshire's longest-serving player suddenly finds himself out in the cold, but no wicketkeeper can hold his place these days on his performances behind the stumps alone.

He also has to be knocking up good scores fairly frequently and it is because the runs have dried up for Blakey that he has had to make way for what everyone hopes will be a pretty good Guy!

Blakey and many of Yorkshire's fans felt for a number of seasons that he was wasted batting well down the order and when he was promoted to No 3 towards the end of last season it seemed as if the experiment had worked as he scored 123 against Glamorgan and signed off with 71 against Surrey at The Oval.

But he was only occasionally successful in the same role at the start of this season and, although he several times kept the innings afloat with his watchful batting, he never really came out of his shell and has fared even worse since going in lower down again.

Blakey has managed only 249 runs in 17 first class innings with just one half century and an average of 15.56.

Now he faces a spell in the second team to see if he can find his touch with the bat again but he will have to do exceptionally well at 33 years of age to push out an up-and-coming 21-year-old.

Whatever the future holds for Blakey, he has already done enough to enter the record books as one of the most successful wicketkeeper-batsmen in Yorkshire's history.

At the beginning of this season, Blakey joined an elite band of batsmen to have scored over 12,000 runs and only a couple of weeks ago, he claimed his 700th first class victim behind the stumps, his tally now standing at 707.

Three times he has had six dismissals in an innings and his nine victims in a match - against Sussex at Eastbourne in 1990 - has been bettered only by his predecessor, David Bairstow, who holds the record of 11, set up against Derbyshire at Scarborough in 1982.

David Hunter, Jimmy Binks and Bairstow all exceeded 1,000 dismissals during their careers and Arthur Wood and Arthur Dolphin managed over 800 but they played in far more matches in those days.

As skipper David Byas was keen to point out, Blakey's one-day career is still very much alive and kicking and he goes into tomorrow's National League Division One match with Somerset as the season's second highest scorer behind Darren Lehmann.

Blakey has rapped out 255 at an average of 28.33 and altogether he stands on 4731 runs in county league cricket and is a candidate to become only the third member of the 5,000 club.

Geoff Boycott leads the way with a career tally of 5051 and David Byas made it to 5001 in the home match against Somerset Sabres at Scarborough a fortnight ago.

While commiserating with Blakey, the fans will at the same time want to wish the best of luck to Guy who plays for Doncaster Town in the Yorkshire League.

Guy gave an excellent account of himself on his only previous appearance against Zimbabwe and he will be keen to show the same good form behind the stumps as Blakey - as well as making quite a few more runs.