Bill Bridge: Lieutenants are needed if Yorkshire's gallant young platoon are to improve

Tim Bresnan will be with England in Australia as they defend the Ashes while Andrew Gale will be leading the second string on their own tour, with county team-mate Adam Lyth for company. Others from the Yorkshire dressing room may well be going along too.

That will be consolation in part for missing out on two trophies in a barnstorming finale to the season which gave the wise old heads in the Long Room at Headingley Carnegie plenty to discuss.

The consensus was that Yorkshire are on the brink of becoming a team to be taken seriously in all forms of the game, one that, given luck, might begin to emulate the feats of the teams led by Brian Sellers and Brian Close.

That might be over-stating the case rather, given that the one thing the present combination lack in comparison to their illustrious forebears is experience and that chink is set to be deepened with the anticipated departure of Jacques Rudolph to South Africa where he hopes to resurrect his Test career.

Sellers could call on any number of sources of advice in the rare moments when he lacked inspiration. If only Gale had the services of Herbert Sutcliffe, Maurice Leyland, Hedley Verity and Bill Bowes to come up with ideas when things were not going right.

Similarly Close had Raymond Illingworth, Jimmy Binks, Doug Padgett and Fred Trueman as more than able lieutenants with the knowledge to turn a negative position into one which became winnable.

The loss of Rudolph's experience may be, at least in part, covered by the return of Ryan Sidebottom. Our Long Room sages are not totally convinced that such a deal would be in Yorkshire's best interests, given that the player wants a six-figure salary and a three-year contract. That is a lot of money and security for someone approaching the end of his career and has suffered his share of injuries.

Not only will Rudolph be missed for his experience; he also scored a bucketful of runs. That, too, will be a significant issue for Gale and director of cricket Martyn Moxon to address. But we must not dwell too much on the downside.

Lyth, Jonathan Bairstow and Gale himself will all be better players for the experience gained this summer, Anthony McGrath has once again proved himself a top-class player, happier without the cares of captaincy, and Yorkshire's stock of all-rounders must be the envy of virtually all their rivals.

Plus there is a clutch of young batsmen playing Second XI cricket eager to press claims for promotion.

The bowling department – always regarded as the key element in any team by successful Yorkshire captains, who accepted to a man that bowling out the opposition twice had to be the objective every time they took the field – looks strong enough to compete with any other in the First Division of the championship, whether or not Sidebottom is added to the roster.

Central contracts for Bresnan and maybe Ajmal Shahzad might be an inconvenience, but, down the years, Yorkshire have grown used to having players on England duty; it goes with being successful.

Maybe Gale does not have a pure fast bowler at his disposal – the likes of Fred Trueman do not come along too often – but otherwise he has all the options needed to succeed on any surface.

So our conclusion in the Long Room was that Yorkshire enjoyed a season of significant progress; roll on 2011.

Tributes and a few tears accompanied the departure of Andrew Flintoff, perhaps the most naturally gifted cricketer of his generation, when he accepted specialist advice that his battered knee was no longer able to take the strain of bowling, even in the Twenty20 game where he would have to deliver only four overs to earn his loot.

There were many sides to Flintoff, the Preston lad who claimed to love life in Lancashire yet who now lives in Dubai, where he was quick to earn another few bucks by shamelessly professing his love for the racing in that country in a shabby TV advert.

There was the Flintoff who terrorised the 2005 Australians; who made a fool of himself in a pedalo; who never quite emulated the feats of his hero Sir Ian Botham; who quickly learned that talent can quickly be turned into far from petty cash; who performed heroically in the climax to the 2009 Ashes series; and who discovered that life at the top for a professional sportsman is a precious but perilously short period.

But the real Flintoff, the one we should remember, was the one who, as a hard-fought and memorable Ashes Test ended with Australia losing by two runs, had the humility to commiserate with the brave but beaten Brett Lee.

Humility and Flintoff may not be mentioned in the same breath too often when he starts his new life as a celebrity in television, the elephants' grave-yard for former England cricketers.

Good luck to him.

For a man who once described himself as a "fat lad" and who earned his first wage working on the record counter at Woolworth's he has not done too badly for himself.

and another thing...

IN A week when the County Championship proved itself a far more relevant competition than anything else, it was sad to read that an Essex player will face court this week accused of conspiracy to commit fraud.

Mervyn Westfield, the prosecution will allege, deliberately bowled wides during a televised match against Durham last season as part of a spot-fixing plot.

News of Westfield's court appointment came on the day Notts won the title and also – as an astute friend pointed out – at the time a remarkable match was unfolding in Leeds. He was not suggesting anything underhand had taken place on the last day of the Yorkshire-Kent game, far from it, rather asking a series of questions.

Had a side playing in a crucial match in Karachi lost their last nine wickets for 37 runs in 55 balls; had a bowler taken a hat-trick over two overs; and had the team chasing 90 to win, scraped home by four wickets, would not eyebrows have been raised, would not Chief Inspector (retired) Marrowphat have been summoned from Dubai? Funny thing, paranoia.