Yorkshire CCC can prove the bookmakers wrong with a successful season

“Otherwise, what’s the point?”

McGrath takes charge of the side for the first time against Hampshire in Southampton on Yorkshire’s return to the Championship’s top flight.

There is plenty of positivity around after promotion last season, a good core of young and senior players, and much to be optimistic about on paper at least as Yorkshire chase their first trophy since 2015.

The bookmakers, however, take a totally different view.

A quick glance at the odds offered by the leading companies shows that Yorkshire are unanimously favoured for a relegation fight in the Championship (mainly themselves or Sussex are tipped to go down with the favoured certainties Worcestershire), and backed to make no impact in the T20 either.

It is a sign of the times, and of the 50-over Cup’s declining importance in the grand scheme of things, that no such odds are available for that competition, one reduced to development status by The Hundred which, for all the money it has brought into the sport, remains, for some of us, white noise.

Gambling is a mug’s game at the best of times, as this pen can testify, but even a mug might be forgiven for fancying Yorkshire to fare somewhat better than the bookmakers suggest.

Granted, it might be a stretch to look too far beyond Surrey - unanimously favoured for a fourth successive Championship, or indeed much further than Somerset or Durham, who should be there or thereabouts, too.

And it would certainly be strange if one was wildly optimistic of white-ball/one-day success given that Yorkshire last tasted it in 2002, their tournament win-rate since then the worst of any club along with Derbyshire.

But Yorkshire should be competitive on all fronts, particularly in the Championship, and might just surprise a few people in the T20 Blast; stranger things have happened in cricket as well as at sea.

With McGrath back after a successful spell in charge of Essex, a new red-ball captain in Jonny Bairstow, and a new T20 captain in Dawid Malan, plus the availability of both of those players for Championship cricket and some good new signings in the squad (domestic and overseas), expectations are high in the Broad Acres at least.

The proof of the Yorkshire pudding will be in the eating, of course, with injuries and the weather perennial variables.

If nothing else, it promises to be intriguing.

There is, one would suggest, another factor to throw into the melting pot - namely, that Yorkshire can now be said to have come through the worst period in any club’s history, even if the aftershocks will rumble for some time yet.

They were torn apart by the racism crisis on-and-off the field, with fines and points deductions having their effect.

But now that the hysteria around that episode has died down, and the bad actors have vacated the stage, the club feels ready to rise again and, crucially, to put all of its focus back on to cricket – its raison d’etre, after all.

One could sense the first seeds of rebirth towards the end of last season, when Yorkshire put behind them a winless first half of the Championship campaign to claim five victories in their last seven games to clinch promotion.

As the clouds of controversy steadily lifted, leaving what could now even be described as a sunlit vista given the money that is coming into the coffers via the sale of the Headingley-based Hundred franchise Northern Supermuffins, or whatever they call it, Yorkshire showed a real fighting spirit and togetherness at the end.

That can only serve them well in Division One - as can the appointment of Bairstow as captain, a man who loves a challenge.

Sir Geoffrey Boycott said in these pages only the other day that Bairstow’s energy and positivity will rub off on the players.

Throw into the mix Bairstow’s runs – as well as those of Malan - and Yorkshire will be confident of getting off to a fast and winning start.

There is a strong nucleus of batsmen, a phalanx of talented all-rounders and some good bowlers, too; no Championship is ever won without a good bowling unit.

Led by the evergreen and ever-consistent Ben Coad, it is one that should be good enough to test the best batsmen in the country; it is just a shame, in this view, that Matthew Fisher has gone to Surrey, for a fit and firing Fisher, the sort that finished last season, can only be missed.

All in all, Yorkshire have the look of dark horses and perhaps something more, a side that in some respects has nothing to lose, although it can never really be that way in a county such as Yorkshire, where the pressure is on and expectation high.

The club might not win the Championship this year but then again they might; at 16/1 with most bookmakers, they certainly look a good-value bet.