Yorkshire CCC 2018: Tim Bresnan has clear sight of his next target

The former England all-rounder explained: “I didn’t particularly play at all well last year. I was out of nick. The ball kept disappearing. I’ve got some contact lenses now, so that should help.

“I had laser eye surgery about eight or nine years ago, but it can wear off. So I’ve got some contacts; I couldn’t see properly!

“I thought I was just horrendously out of nick, but I couldn’t see the ball!”

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Notwithstanding the whimsical undertone and self-deprecation, Bresnan’s eyesight is sharper again.

Equally clear is his determination to win more silverware with Yorkshire, despite the lure of lucrative white-ball cricket around the globe. Bresnan, 33, remains a force in all formats, having helped Perth Scorchers to the semi-finals of the latest Big Bash League and also represented Sylhet Sixers in the Bangladesh Premier League during the winter.

But his love for Yorkshire remains undimmed, with his enthusiasm as clear as day.

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t still have that enthusiasm,” he said. “I could have probably gone and played a lot more T20 cricket around the world and cashed in a few of those chips, but I want to play red-ball cricket for Yorkshire and I want a few more Championships on my CV.

“I want to win with this group of lads and keep doing that for as long as I can.

“I want to play for several more years and I’m just taking it year-by-year and making sure that I’m honest with Galey (coach Andrew Gale) and Martyn (Moxon, director of cricket).

Bresnan boasts a glittering CV – Ashes, T20 World Cup, Championships, and so on – but he still has plenty of targets to achieve.

“I kind of enjoy passing on a bit of knowledge to the younger guys – not from a coaching point of view, just more from experience and things like that,” he said.

“On the field, I want to win trophies, and I’d love to win a T20 trophy with Yorkshire and also a one-day comp with Yorkshire again. That gets me excited, and I think that we’ve got the players to do it.

“It’s difficult to win three formats – it’s not impossible, but you need to be very lucky, especially with injuries – but we’ve got a great squad.”

Bresnan is in good shape after a winter of T20 and then practising hard with Yorkshire, and he says he prefers to keep ticking over.

“It’s nice to keep ticking over cricket-wise,” he said. “I find the start-stop quite difficult, to be honest, plus it’s a lot warmer in Perth than it is running sprints at Weetwood when your water’s freezing in your water bottle.

“I’m just really looking forward to the season and the lads are as a whole, because we had a disappointing one last year.

“Most of the lads struggled, for one reason or another, and only Ben Coad could really hold his head high.”

As he approaches the twilight period of a great career, Bresnan seems in a relaxed frame of mind.

With all the money now swirling around in the game due to T20, he could be forgiven for wishing that he was just starting out, but he insists that he would not exchange a host of great memories.

“The young lads now will probably go on to earn more money than we ever did, but then we got more money than previous generations,” he said.

“I was part of an England team that won a lot and, at the end of the day, you can’t put a price on that.”