Players need more time to prepare for T20 Blast says Yorkshire CCC captain Dawid Malan

Malan leads Yorkshire for the first time in his new role on Friday when the club starts its T20 Blast campaign against Northamptonshire at Headingley.

Yorkshire have had just two training days leading into the competition following a hectic spell of County Championship action, and Malan feels the situation is unfair on all clubs with every county in the same boat.

“It’s bizarre considering that T20 cricket is so big around the world,” said Malan, formerly the world’s No 1 batsman in the 20-over format.

“You probably need a week or so to get your head around white-ball cricket, to be rested from the four-day cricket, and you want to be able to give guys an opportunity to work on their skills and give them the best chance to perform.

“As important as Test cricket is in the world, the world is leaning towards T20 cricket at the moment, and that seems to be where the funding comes from.

“T20 is a long tournament, over four months, and it’s a struggle getting overseas players for that length of time.

“Logistically, it’s an absolute nightmare to get good players consistently available for the comp.

"You might lose an overseas and then your dynamics change and you have to change the team again. It's incredibly frustrating, and you'd think that someone up top would be quite keen to look at the schedule and try and simplify it.

“We’re not the only team that struggles like this - everyone does; this is not a ‘poor Yorkshire’, or anything like that.

“You’d think they’d be able to work the schedule out a little bit better and try and squeeze it all into one block to be able to give guys the best opportunities because, if we can get the schedule right, the tournament could be an unbelievable standard.”

Yorkshire and their fellow counties play 14 group games through to July 18, with the quarter-finals and Finals Day held in September.

Malan, 37, has had little time to get his messaging across with seven County Championship games in the space of eight weeks since the beginning of the season as attention now shifts to a competition in which Yorkshire have traditionally floundered.

They are one of four counties, in fact, along with Derbyshire, Durham and Glamorgan, who have never won the T20 since it started in 2003 - three years before Malan made his senior debut.

As such, the former England man is not minded to make any outlandish predictions, although he is quietly hopeful of a successful campaign.

“It’s disappointing they (Yorkshire) have never won it,” he said. “I'm not going to say we're going to walk out and win it, although obviously we’d like to.

“I think we've got to play some good cricket to get to that point and unless you qualify it's not even something that you really want to be thinking about at this stage.

“I think the first thing is just to get the players that we have together, see how we want to go about doing it, and then hopefully we can perform well enough and take it from there.”

Yorkshire have only three times reached Finals Day - in 2012, 2016 and 2022. Asked what it would take to get there this year, Malan identified a good record at Headingley as key to their chances.

“I think if you look at the past couple of years, especially the times I've been here, it's a really high-scoring ground and you need bowlers that are able to defend and batters that are able to attack and be able to take the game on for consistent periods of time here,” he said. “And, if you do really well at home, you tend to do quite well in the tournament.

“So, I think first and foremost, if we can win our home games and do as well as we can here, that makes life a lot easier when we go away.

“But bowlers, in my opinion, win T20 games, they win you tournaments, whereas batters keep you in it, so hopefully the batters that we have this year can put some numbers on the board to aid the bowlers and they can win the games for us.”

Yorkshire take on a Northamptonshire side who reached the quarters last year and then play Worcestershire at New Road on Sunday as the 14-match group stage cranks up apace.

Worcestershire finished second-bottom of last season’s North Group (Yorkshire finished seventh) but Malan is expecting two tough tests.

“It’s two good teams,” he said. “Northants put a lot of time into their T20, and Worcester always have a team that competes in white-ball cricket, so, yeah, two tough fixtures to get initially, especially given the lack of preparation time.

“But, as I say, everyone’s in the same boat on that, it’s not just us.”