Little time for Gale to worry over congested fixture list

A vital Twenty20 match with Lancashire on Friday night is followed immediately with a trip to leaders Durham in the County Championship before Yorkshire are cast straight back into the crash-bang-wallop of 20 overs with the visit of Derbyshire next Wednesday.

Six days of cricket, two different formats of the game. Hardly time to draw breath, let alone raise any objections.

So Yorkshire captain Andrew Gale is not bothering complaining. His task is to get his men ready for what could be a defining period in their season in the two competitions.

“We can’t control the schedule as a team,” said Gale. “It hasn’t been ideal for a few years, and I know the ECB are trying to work towards having an ideal schedule.

“But we’ve just got to get our heads down and get on with it, we’re not the only county, there’s a lot of us playing Friday in the Twenty20 and County Championship on the Saturday.

“It’s not easy, but you don’t want to moan about it. You can’t see it as a negative. You’ve just got to get on with it.”

In the time between the rain abandonment of Sunday’s Twenty20 game against Northamptonshire and the resumption of their rivalry with Lancashire on Friday, Gale has been trying to strike a balance between preparing for the two very different versions of cricket.

“It’s difficult, we’ve got a big match against Lancashire that we’ll be preparing hard for but in the back of our minds there’s the Championship on Saturday,” he said.

“So it’s about finding that balance where you train for both formats. The boys will put some time aside during Twenty20 training to do their own individual stuff, what they need to do to prepare for the Championship.

“Whether that’s finding time to go on a bowling machine to practise leaving the ball outside off-stump as opposed to throwing your hands as hard as you can at it, or just practising the Dilshan scoop.

“It’s something the boys will be told to do individually more than collectively.”

Yorkshire at least go into the shorter-format of the game in good spirits, following a late flurry against Lancashire at Old Trafford that helped them even out their record in the North Division.

Gale, who has set his side the target of victories in all their remaining Twenty20 games such is his confidence in his side’s ability, believes they have found their stride after the opening two defeats because of the preparation time they have been afforded.

Again a frustration of the fixture list meant Yorkshire started their Twenty20 campaign just hours after returning home from a two-week journey around the country playing Championship and CB40 fixtures.

But Gale said: “We came straight off the back of Championship cricket from Hove and we didn’t have one day to prepare for Twenty20, some of the boys hadn’t played it since pre-season.

“We probably got caught a bit cold, the boys didn’t really know the game plan. But when we had three or four days to sit down and look at it we came up with a way to win Twenty20 games and we put that into practice last Thursday and Friday, performing much better than we did in the first two games.”

Part of that plan was working out how best to counter a lack of explosive hitting, something Gale pinpointed over the weekend as being a chink in his side’s armoury.

“We haven’t got someone who comes in and clears the ropes consistently,” said Gale, who paid tribute to the returning Azeem Rafiq for the role he played in closing out victory against their Roses rivals.

“If you can’t clear the ropes and hit sixes there’s no point swinging at it, you’ve got to be smarter.

“Those little scoops Azeem played at Lancashire are an example of what we’ve been working hard on and that will help us.

“The exposure to first class cricket Azeem has had at Derbyshire has helped him develop his game and he’s come back full of beans.”

Rafiq will likely be in the team to lock horns with Lancashire again on Friday when Yorkshire – who have already sold more than 10,000 tickets – are hoping for a capacity crowd at Headingley Carnegie.

Roses matches always get bums on seats and with the Red Rose smarting from losing a game they will feel they should have won and the White Rose buoyed by their last-gasp heroics, Gale is anticipating another exciting contest.

“To win in the fashion that we did shows a lot of character,” he said.

“Friday will be a different test, Lancashire will come pretty hard at us, they will have learned a lesson from last week, they’ll know a little bit more about us and they’ll be hurting from losing on their patch and will be up for doing the same to us.”

Worcestershire are confident Pakistan spinner Saeed Ajmal will finally be able to make his debut in Friday’s Twenty20 clash with rivals Warwickshire at Edgbaston.

Visa trouble held up Ajmal, who was due to link up with the Royals earlier this month after Pakistan’s tour of the West Indies.