IT'S official Yorkshire paceman Matthew Hoggard is now one of England's top ten bowlers of all time.

However the paceman has no intention of staying rooted in ninth place in this illustrious table of famous cricketers.

When Hoggard held on to a return catch to dismiss Sri Lanka's Farveez Maharoof in the first Test at Lord's a few weeks ago he became only the tenth England bowler to bag 200 Test wickets.

By the end of that game he had nosed one above John Snow, who finished his career with 202 victims, and a further five wickets in the second Test at Edgbaston moved Hoggard on to 208.

That meant that when the third and final Test with Sri Lanka began at Trent Bridge yesterday, Hoggard was only 21 dismissals away from equalling the 229 Test wickets of his former Yorkshire team-mate and buddy Darren Gough, now seeing out the remainder of his active days with Essex.

Hoggard is as different as chalk and cheese in temperament and personality from The Dazzler'. While Goughie's ego is always bursting out of him, Hoggy calmly takes everything in his stride.

Make no mistake about it, however, Hoggard is gunning for Gough and who dare say that he will not have knocked him down a place by the end of this summer if he can stay on his feet all that time?

Four Tests with Pakistan follow the Sri Lanka series and if the unflappable Hoggard can maintain something like his present consistency he may well reach the 230 mark before the end of this summer.

And if he gets close without quite managing it, then the scene will be set for Hoggard to push ahead of Gough during the series in Australia this winter when Hoggard will be a major player in England's bid to hold on to the Ashes which they so dramatically regained last summer.

It would be splitting hairs to say that one of the two is better than the other for each has served England magnificently in different ways.

Gough was quicker and up and at 'em while Hoggard's strength is his capacity to bowl for long spells, often in energy draining conditions, while still preserving the knack of snatching an early wicket.

Like Gough, Hoggard also has the ability to hog the headlines on occasions, as he did when he performed the hat-trick in the third Test against the West Indies at Bridgetown in 2003-04 by firing out Ramnaresh Sarwan, Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Ryan Hinds and when he grabbed 12 wickets in the fourth Test v South Africa in Johannesburg in 2004-05, including the first six to fall in the second innings when he returned figures of 7-61.

Only one other Yorkshireman is in the England Top Ten list of bowlers and that is the great Fred Trueman, who was the first person in Test cricket to top 300 wickets .

Fiery Fred's final tally was 307 at 21.57, the lowest average of anyone in the list, with Gough being his closest rival.

Fred, currently undergoing treatment for cancer and fighting the illness with all the courage he showed on the field, is cast from a similar mould to Gough rather than Hoggard, and he has never been slow in telling all who will listen that he would have taken far more wickets than 307 if the selectors had chosen him for as many Tests as they should.

At 29 years of age, and with the amount of Test cricket that is played these days, Hoggard has every chance of going on to knock Fred out of third place to become Yorkshire's leading England wicket-taker of all time, but he still has a long trek down the road before he catches up with the leader Ian Botham, who boasts 383 wickets from 102 matches.