Underdogs Yorkshire ready as the going gets tough

At 12.30pm in Cape Town tomorrow, beneath the imposing shadow of Table Mountain, Yorkshire will play their first game in the Twenty20 Champions League tournament proper against the Australian franchise Sydney Sixers.

Lining up for Sydney will be one Mitchell Aaron Starc, the 22-year-old left-arm pace bowler who played a key role in Yorkshire winning through to the Champions League competition in the first place.

Starc’s 21 wickets at 10.38 helped Yorkshire to the Twenty20 Cup final, which, in turn, secured their passage to the global spectacular.

Starc is on the “wrong” side this time because Sydney are his home franchise and because, under tournament rules, Yorkshire would have had to pay circa £90,000 compensation to Sydney to prise him away.

As Yorkshire’s director of cricket Martyn Moxon explained before setting off to South Africa, that was “simply not an option”; not only are Yorkshire some £20m in debt, but Starc’s allegiance, quite rightly, is to the city of his birth.

However, Yorkshire will not have to face Starc’s Sydney team-mate Brett Lee, who has, instead, chosen to represent his Indian Premier League franchise Kolkata Knight Riders, with competition rules stating that players can nominate who they play for should two of their sides reach the Champions League.

As the IPL hold all the financial cards when it comes to having first call on players, effectively holding them to ransom, Lee grudgingly switched sides along with eight other players who found themselves in the same situation – including Trinidad & Tobago’s Kieron Pollard, Sunil Narine and Dwayne Bravo.

No Lee for Yorkshire to worry about, then, but his Sydney replacement is one of cricket’s rising stars.

Pat Cummins, 19, has been tipped as a future spearhead of Australia’s pace attack, which means he must be useful if that spearhead is not Starc.

Cummins made a stunning Test debut against South Africa in Johannesburg last November, claiming seven wickets before helping his team to a tense two-wicket victory with the bat.

Like Starc, Cummins can bowl 90mph-plus, with the pair set to test not only Yorkshire tomorrow but, quite possibly, England during next summer’s Ashes.

The Sixers also have another significant ace up their sleeve in Shane Watson.

The all-rounder was Australia’s standout performer in the Twenty20 World Cup just ended, claiming four successive man-of-the-match awards.

Such was Watson’s glittering form in the tournament that Brad Haddin, the Sydney captain, spent much of the Champions League build-up insisting that the Sixers are definitely no one-man team.

Sydney also possess another player who will need no introduction to Yorkshire’s supporters – Michael Lumb, the former Yorkshire batsman, who has played nine Twenty20 internationals and who was a non-playing member of England’s World Cup squad.

It all adds up to a potentially arduous first group game for Yorkshire but, as Billy Ocean in actual fact made clear, “when the going gets tough, the tough get going”.

Not many expected Yorkshire to come through qualifying, but they did so with flying colours by beating Sir Lankan champions Uva Next by five wickets and Trinidad & Tobago by six wickets to top their three-team qualifying pool.

Yorkshire certainly did a darn sight better than Hampshire, who beat them in the Twenty20 Cup final but who lost both their qualifying games against Auckland Aces and Sialkot Stallions, with Auckland joining Yorkshire in the main tournament as the other qualifiers.

The six qualifiers were competing for two places in the main event, which features the top-four IPL franchises, the winner and runner-up of Australia’s Big Bash and the winner and runner-up of South Africa’s T20 MiWay Challenge (the invitational Champions League is so formatted because it is bankrolled by the cricket boards of India, Australia and South Africa and so heavily weighted towards their teams).

Yorkshire are the least fancied of the 10 sides to win the competition, which carries a first prize of £1.6m, and which is split into two groups of five, with each team playing the other once and the top two from each group going through to the semi-finals.

The bookmakers are rarely wrong and yet Yorkshire would appear to have the class – and perhaps significantly the carefree attitude that invariably accompanies the underdog – to suggest they might just surprise a few more people between now and the end of the month.

It may well prove beyond their compass to win the trophy, particularly with Starc missing, Jonny Bairstow injured, Tim Bresnan unavailable due to England’s policy of wrapping players in cotton wool and with South African batsman David Miller only returning for the last of Yorkshire’s four group games, plus any semi-final and final, due to first-class cricketing commitments with his South African franchise Dolphins.

However, Somerset upset the form book last year by reaching the semi-finals and although Yorkshire have publicly been playing down expectations while nevertheless insisting they are not there to “make up the numbers”, privately they will fancy their chances.

Perhaps Yorkshire’s main goal from here should be to surprise one of the big guns, for, after tomorrow’s game, they face Mumbai Indians in Cape Town on Thursday, Highveld Lions in Johannesburg on Saturday and Chennai Super Kings in Durban next Monday.

On paper, the Lions look the most beatable, with the bookmakers not particularly rating their chances either and with their “big guns” including captain Alviro Petersen, Neil McKenzie and Zander de Bruyn.

Mumbai are defending champions and have a chap called Sachin Tendulkar, along with such luminaries as Kieron Pollard, Harbhajan Singh, Lasith Malinga and Mitchell Johnson in their ranks.

It would be a serious achievement for Yorkshire to beat Mumbai, as it would if they could see off Chennai, the 2010 winners, who are led by Mahendra Singh Dhoni, but, although the odds are heavily stacked against the White Rose county, it would surprise no-one hereabouts if their own collection of tough customers now really got going.

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