Captain Steve Patterson feels Yorkshire have little room to manoeuvre after Royal London Cup tie

Patterson feels that they have little margin for error beginning with tomorrow’s trip to leaders Nottinghamshire, which is followed by away games at Northamptonshire on Wednesday and Worcestershire next Saturday and a home match with Durham on Monday week.

Yorkshire remain sixth in the nine-county North Group at the halfway stage of the group campaign after a tie with Derbyshire at Emerald Headingley. The hosts looked nailed-on for victory at 308-2 from 40 overs when rain intervened, leaving Derbyshire a revised target of 225 from 22 overs, the visitors closing on 224-3.

“With only one win out of our first four games you’d imagine we’d need at least three more wins to qualify,” said Patterson.

“Now we go to Trent Bridge and it’s going to be tough work. It’s a high-scoring ground and we’re going to have to play some bloody good cricket to win because Notts are in good form and it’s a real challenge.”

Reflecting on the Derbyshire result, the pace bowler added: “It’s obviously frustrating when rain plays a part, and with 10 overs to go in our innings, only two-down, we felt that we were in a really strong position.

“We were looking to get somewhere around the 400-mark, which we felt would have been a winning score.

“But we still should have been capable of defending the revised target, and, on this occasion, we weren’t good enough to do it.

“In the field we were poor and dropped a number of half-chances, while we can bowl better collectively, so it’s very frustrating.”

Match report: Page 7