Challenge issued for Yorkshire to go and dominate

The Yorkshire chairman has challenged them to build on their Championship title by dominating county cricket for the next decade.

Graves made his comments on the opening day of Yorkshire’s final game of the season against Somerset at Headingley.

The champions scored 
241-9, Alex Lees hitting 83 and Jack Leaning an unbeaten 50.

Outlining his vision for the future, Graves said: “The target I’m setting the players and coaches is for Yorkshire to dominate county cricket for the next 10 years.

“That’s what I’ve said to Martyn Moxon (director of cricket) and Jason Gillespie (first team coach), that I believe it could be the start of a golden era. With the players we’ve got and the Academy guys coming through, I think we could have another 1960s situation on our hands, I seriously do. I want us to dominate like we did back then, and I think we can.”

The 1960s was the last golden era of Yorkshire cricket, when the club boasted such luminaries as Fred Trueman, Brian Close, Raymond Illingworth and Geoffrey Boycott.

Yorkshire won seven Championships in the 10 seasons from 1959, with this year’s title only their second since 1968.

Although the Championship remains the club’s top priority, Graves also wants improvements in one-day cricket.

Yorkshire failed to qualify for the NatWest T20 Blast knockout stages this summer, despite recruiting the world’s best T20 batsman in Aaron Finch, and they were knocked out in the Royal London One-Day Cup quarter-finals to make it 12 years without any one-day silverware.

“If we’re short on anything it’s in one-day cricket,” said Graves.

“Unfortunately, Finchy (Aaron Finch) didn’t really do it for us this year, and we lack somebody who can belt the ball out of the ground on a regular basis.

“We need that one person; David Miller did it for us a couple of years ago, when we got to the Twenty20 Cup final, and that’s the one type of player we haven’t been able to develop ourselves.

“If we can develop that one player, home-grown, then we’ve cracked it because although we’ve won the Championship and want to keep that success going, we also want to win one-day trophies.”

Graves, whose personal fortune has bankrolled Yorkshire for more than a decade, believes the club could develop a taste for trophies not dissimilar to that demonstrated in recent times by Manchester United in football. He senses Yorkshire have the same motivation to develop a dynasty.

“Success breeds success,” said Graves. “Once you get a taste of it, you want more.

“It’s a bit like Man Utd in football; as soon as they won a trophy, they wanted to win again and again, and I think you’ll find it’s the same with our lot.”

This week’s match has the air of a victory parade, with the Yorkshire players set to do a lap of honour at its conclusion when they show off the Championship trophy to spectators.

There were just under 3,000 present yesterday to watch Yorkshire labour beneath leaden skies, although batting conditions were never easy.

Lees coped with conditions as well as anyone on a day when he received his county cap.

Andrew Gale, the Yorkshire captain, said Lees, 21, was “crying his eyes out in the dressing room”, such was the emotion he felt at receiving the award, while Lees himself described the honour as “the proudest moment of my life”.

Gale, who is suspended for this game following his verbal outburst at Lancashire’s Ashwell Prince earlier this month, is waiting to hear when he will face an England and Wales Cricket Board disciplinary hearing into an alleged racist element to his comments to the black South African.

Discussions between Yorkshire’s lawyers and those of the ECB were believed to have taken place yesterday, with Gale’s hearing set for early October.

Gale held a Q&A at lunchtime in the Long Room, where questions about Prince were strictly off-limits. The case against Gale has been significantly weakened by Prince’s assertion that he did not consider the Yorkshireman’s remarks a racial slur.

Yorkshire lost regular wickets yesterday after acting captain Joe Root won the toss, although Somerset did not make maximum use of the assistance on offer.

Peter Trego was their most successful bowler with three wickets, coming back well after a shaky start, while Alfonso Thomas got rid of dangermen Adam Lyth and Gary Ballance.

Root was dropped twice on his way to 35, while Leaning batted with great tenacity to reach a 115-ball half-century with seven fours.