Captain Andrew Gale believes Yorkshire may have to do it the unconventional way if they are to go on and win this summer’s Friends Life t20 competition.

Gale has bemoaned the lack of a genuine big hitter in his squad following a patchy start to their North Division campaign, which began with successive defeats but was picked up last week with successive wins.

Yorkshire currently sit joint-fourth in the North Division with five points from as many matches, and have a game in hand on closest rivals Warwickshire. Fourth position would be good enough to see them qualify for the quarter-finals after 16 matches.

Their bid for a third win on the spin against Northamptonshire was wiped out due to the weather on Sunday.

Yorkshire have only scored one Twenty20 half-century so far this summer, and have only hit five sixes.

That is compared to North Division leaders Nottinghamshire, who have scored six half-centuries and walloped 26 sixes from the same number of fixtures.

In fact, Notts scored two 50s and hit nine sixes in the match against Yorkshire at Trent Bridge last Sunday.

And Gale said: “It’s still an area that’s of concern. We’ve got no one really in the club apart from Jonny Bairstow who can clear the boundaries consistently.

“We haven’t really got an out and out hitter. You watch somebody like Abdul Razzaq, but we’ve not got anybody like that who can hit six, four, six, four. We haven’t got the funds to bring in an overseas player, so we have to work hard on it ourselves.”

The most widely used practice technique is range hitting, a technical term for trying to leather the living daylights out of a ball thrown down to a batsman stood in the middle of a ground.

Gale continued: “We’ve worked harder at it in training, and there are signs that things are improving. But it’s all about putting it into a match situation. If we’re going to compete with the best sides in the country, that’s what we’ve got to improve on.

“We also put scenarios in place where the lads who bat in the middle have to bat against spin and get say 40 runs with two wickets in hand.”

Gale is the only man to score a 50 for Yorkshire in this summer’s competition and he, like opening partner Bairstow, is also capable of playing the big shot.

“Up front we’ve done well in nearly every game, putting between 50 and 70 on,” he added. “It’s been between the sixth and 14th over that’s been the problem when we’ve lost momentum. It’s even more difficult when you lose wickets too.

“We’ve got to be smarter. If you can’t clear the boundaries, you’ve got to be picking up the twos and threes by chipping over the in-field.”

Director of professional cricket Martyn Moxon said: “Ideally, we want one of our top four to get 70-plus in every game because, statistically, if one of your batsmen gets that sort of score you tend to win 90 per cent of your games.”

Yorkshire’s next match is against Lancashire at Headingley on Friday.