More positivity needed if Yorkshire are to win promotion - Chris Waters

And then the crunch comes…

For Yorkshire it came at Bristol on Sunday when, armed with a sizeable lead and against a side who had not won in the County Championship for 19 months, they addressed the question of when to declare their second innings.

Once the think-tank had deliberated the answer was as follows - they pulled out just after tea on day three, setting Gloucestershire 498 to win from a minimum of 122 overs.

There is so much data in cricket these days that little escapes the analysts and experts.

Why, there is probably someone in the Yorkshire backroom staff who could tell you what percentage of deliveries Joe Root, for example, leaves in a four-to-six inch corridor outside his off stump against left-arm medium pacers whose surname begins with the letter ‘J’.

No stone is left unturned as sides seek those all important “one-percenters”.

Often overlooked, however, is the statistical history of the game, by no means irrelevant, beside-the-point detail.

Anyone with a reasonable grasp of that history - a category in which I would immodestly put myself - would know that sides rarely, if ever, chase 498.

In the interests of providing such context in my report from the game, I ascertained from well-known and easily searchable cricket websites that this particular target was so huge that it had only twice been exceeded in the 134-year history of the Championship. For the record, Middlesex scored 502-6 to beat Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge in 1925, and Surrey hit 501-5 to beat Kent at Canterbury last year.

And that’s it. In more than 20,000 Championship games, spanning over a century. Why, sightings of Lord Lucan riding Shergar are almost as frequent.

But if muggins here can find that information at the few clicks of a mouse, then couldn’t Yorkshire? Or, if they did know, what was the rationale in thinking that Gloucestershire could chase such a score?

Are the Yorkshire bowlers so bad, or the Gloucestershire batsmen so good (there is no W.G. Grace or W.R. Hammond today), that it was ever a realistic proposition?

Who, exactly, made the decision and who, if anyone, is challenging retrospectively?

Afterwards, clues as to Yorkshire’s thinking were gleanable from post-match quotes.

We heard that the Kookaburra ball didn’t help matters, offering little to the bowlers… We heard that the pitch was slow, as pitches often are in April… We were reminded that there are more points for a draw now - eight instead of five… We were alerted to the size of the boundaries at the ground - 50 metres on one side, apparently.

At the end of the day, though, forget all that. For if a side as poor as Gloucestershire is good enough to beat a side as good as Yorkshire by chasing down nearly 500, good luck to them. Anything else is a smokescreen.

Yes, but what about the fact that Gloucestershire ended the game on 405-6? Doesn’t that prove that it was, in fact, a good declaration? Why, isn’t it just as well that Yorkshire gave themselves such a large safety net?

No.

Had Yorkshire declared earlier, proceedings would have taken a completely different shape. The field settings - occasionally so attacking that it seemed that there was barely a man 20 yards from the bat, allowing easy runs to be scored in the search for wickets - would have been much more pragmatic. The carrot of a chaseable target - as opposed to an unrealistic one - might have elicited errors, especially if the winning line did actually near.

Instead, at no point did Gloucestershire go for the runs, think that they could get them or reach anything like 405-6 without being handed some easy pickings at times as Yorkshire got funky/desperate in strategy. The match petered out - and the opportunity was lost.

So, what could have happened?

Well, an opportune moment to declare might have been when Root was out, at which point Yorkshire were 310-4, a lead of 373.

Couldn’t Gloucestershire have knocked off 374 though?

Yes, theoretically, but they have only once chased more since the Championship started in 1890. In addition, Yorkshire have conceded only five higher totals in their history, so, on the balance of overwhelming probability, the answer is “no”.

It’s all very well talking a good game, saying that you’re going to play positive, attacking cricket and doing everything you can to get out of Division Two - a minimum requirement this year, and then it’s another thing actually doing it.

More positivity will be required when the chance next comes.