HAVE YOUR SAY: Harmison set to make shock return

The club are ready to overlook Harmison’s wayward tendencies for his wicket-taking threat in an effort to win County Championship promotion.

Harmison bowled 18 wides and 11 no-balls in 42 overs during a one-month loan spell cut short by a side injury at the end of July.

But the 33-year-old also took eight wickets at 24 – statistics that have convinced Yorkshire it may be worth turning a blind eye to his erratic inclinations as they look to secure an immediate return to Division One.

Yorkshire have re-opened talks with Harmison and are waiting to discover whether his parent county, Durham, would agree the move.

Yorkshire would first need Harmison to prove his fitness in practice after he injured himself bowling on the final day of the Championship match against Leicestershire at Grace Road.

However, Yorkshire are conscious of the fact that games are fast running out as they attempt to return to the highest level.

The club occupy the second and final promotion place with four games left but their rivals each have a match in hand.

Commenting on the possibility of re-signing Harmison, Yorkshire’s director of cricket Martyn Moxon said: “There’s quite a few boxes to tick first but it’s not out of the question.

“He’s not going to be allowed to bowl until the back end of this week after his injury so he’d have to prove his fitness in practice.

“We’d need to see him bowl two or three times to know that he’s okay, so we will probably know more early next week.

“I’ve asked the question of Durham but I haven’t yet had an answer, while the other thing we’d have to consider is whether we think we’ve already got anyone in our squad capable of matching his wicket-taking stats.”

The contrast between Harmison’s bowling average for Yorkshire and his concession of extras encapsulates the enigmatic quality of a man once ranked the world’s No 1 bowler.

Harmison is as likely to spray the ball into the hands of second slip, as he famously did at the start of the 2006-07 Ashes series, as he is to bowl world-class players like Ramnaresh Sarwan with devastating yorkers, which he twice did at Grace Road.

“He’s got that knack of taking wickets and that’s the beauty of Steve,” added Moxon, who previously worked with the player at the Riverside.

“By his own admission, he’s not been at his best lately – everybody could see that.

“But he’s still taken wickets for us and his stats aren’t that bad.

“The frustration was that on the final day at Leicester, when he got injured, he was just starting to run in with a bit more confidence and purpose.”

Moxon believes the injury was caused by a lack of bowling.

Harmison had bowled only 56.2 overs in first-class cricket this season prior to joining Yorkshire 
due to a combination of bad weather, indifferent form and Durham’s selection strategy, while he is a man of whom it has often been contended that he needs as many overs under his belt as possible.

“Stopping and starting on that final day at Grace Road due to bad weather didn’t help in terms of the injury,” said Moxon.

“Steve hadn’t had a lot of overs before he joined us and stopping and starting and getting loose 
every time didn’t help the situation.

“That’s probably borne out by the fact that the side injury wasn’t actually a full-blown tear.

“It was literally just a lack of bowling that caused the injury.”

As Yorkshire ponder another move for Harmison, their immediate attention is on CB40 League cricket and today’s floodlit fixture against Northamptonshire at Wantage Road, which has a 3.40pm start.

Defeat by three wickets against Warwickshire at Edgbaston on Tuesday left Yorkshire second-bottom of Group C with two wins from seven games, needing to win their last five matches to stand any chance of reaching the semi-finals.

That aspiration is not yet beyond them mathematically but almost certainly is realistically, and it is a source of frustration to all connected with the club that Yorkshire have been magnificent in one limited-overs tournament – the Twenty20 tournament – and no better than mediocre in the other (CB40).

Moxon believes it is a simple matter of skill execution.

“The thing we’ve done really well in Twenty20 is get our yorkers in,” he said.

“We didn’t do that against Warwickshire the other night and we also lost at Chesterfield recently when he had Derbyshire on the rack but didn’t bowl well enough for long enough to drive home the advantage.

“I just think the skills that we’ve executed so well in T20, and particularly our skills with the ball, we haven’t executed as well in 40-over cricket.

“We need to get better at closing out games.”

Yorkshire travel to a Northamptonshire club which yesterday appointed former captain David Ripley as head coach.

Ripley, 45, had been acting head coach since the club parted company last month with David Capel.

Yorkshire squad: Gale (capt), Jaques, Lyth, Miller, Ballance, Brophy, Rashid, Rafiq, Patterson, Wardlaw, Ashraf, Lilley, Leaning.

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