We can still win promotion - Yorkshire head coach Ottis Gibson

Yorkshire were relegated last season after losing six of their final eight games, a sequence that has since extended to eight defeats in 12 matches and left them bottom of Division Two after two defeats, two draws and one abandonment this year.

Yorkshire have not won a Championship match since Gibson’s first in charge against Gloucestershire at Bristol 14 months ago, their subsequent winless stretch of 17 fixtures (excluding the abandoned game at Bristol in April) the second-longest in their history behind a 20-match winless sequence in 2008/2009.

With the spectre of points penalties still hanging over the club pending the outcome of the hearings into the racism affair, with the Cricket Discipline Commission (CDC) rumoured to be ready to announce sanctions sometime before the Andromeda galaxy collides with our own Milky Way in around four billion years, all bets could yet be off regardless of any stunning run of form from this point on.

Gibson can only work with the known facts, of course, as opposed to trying to second-guess the CDC which, given the general incompetence/mishandling of the matter, will probably award Yorkshire points as opposed to taking them away in a comical twist.

At any rate, it remains unclear when any points penalties would kick-in after Yorkshire pleaded guilty to charges which, on closer examination, did not stand up to scrutiny and which suggested a certain eagerness on their part to present their exposed backside in readiness for the cane that will eventually descend.

As that tedious process continues, Gibson is focused solely on achieving what was considered the minimum target at the start of the season – promotion.

Asked if that was still the target, with nine games left and theoretically 216 points still up for grabs, he said: “Absolutely. It’s a 14-game season and we’ve only played four games (excluding the abandonment). We’ve still got a lot of cricket to play.

"If we can use the momentum that we’ve generated in the T20 Blast in four-day cricket, then that gives us a chance.

“Promotion was the aim right from the start, but of course we need to win games.

"We’ve got back more to focusing on the process lately – let’s not look too far ahead at the end result of a match, but on the here and now and performing and executing our skills as best we can.

“For me, and it was my responsibility because I was drilling ‘promotion, promotion, promotion’ all the time rather than ‘process, process, process’ and the steps that we need to take to get to where we want to go to, we’ve stripped things back a little bit in T20 and it feels like it’s taken pressure off the lads.

“The team is in a much better place than before the start of the tournament; Shan (Masood, the new captain) has led the way on the field, marshalling the troops, and of course he’s getting to know the players a lot better and hopefully it’s showing out on the pitch.”

Improved T20 form since a poor start to that competition has given Gibson and Yorkshire renewed belief – not that he felt they had played badly in the Championship prior to T20.

Gibson felt they could easily have won three of their first four games (excluding Bristol), only for Leicestershire to chase a big target at Headingley, the rain to intervene at Sussex, and then Durham to win narrowly in Yorkshire’s last match.

“If we’d been playing terrible cricket it would be different, but we weren’t playing terrible cricket,” said Gibson.

“We should have won the Leicester game where they chased 380.

"We definitely would have won in Sussex.

"At Durham, I still feel like we should have won that game as well.

“That would have been three wins in the Championship and it would be a very different outlook, but these things happen in sport and that’s why (I am) ‘never too high, never too low’.”