Yorkshire CCC need emphatic response to record-breaking setback

Alas, it doesn’t quite work like that - you pays your money and you takes your choice.

But their frustration was understandable as their side crashed to a 144-run defeat against Derbyshire on Sunday, Yorkshire’s heaviest in the competition and the joint second-heaviest in its 20-year history.

After conceding 212-4, with 91 coming off the last five overs and 31 off the final over bowled by Ben Mike, whose figures of 1-74 from four were Yorkshire’s worst and the sixth-worst anywhere, Yorkshire were dismissed for 68, their lowest T20 score.

There’s a bad day at the office and then there’s a bad day at the office.

As Ottis Gibson, the Yorkshire head coach put it afterwards, “the difficulty is the nature of the defeat”.

There is no time, however, for moping around.

Yorkshire are straight back in action against Northamptonshire at Headingley on Tuesday, the 11th of 14 group games as they look to cement a top-four position and place in the quarter-finals.

The Derbyshire result saw them drop from second to fourth in the North Group, level on points with leaders Birmingham (who have a match in hand), Lancashire and Nottinghamshire, all of whom are separated by net run-rate, with Yorkshire’s having taken a battering.

Another two wins from four could yet be enough, but a Northamptonshire team led by David Willey cannot be taken for granted, despite their second-bottom status, with Birmingham the visitors to Headingley on Thursday before a trip to Durham the following day.

Following a break for the County Championship match against Gloucestershire at Headingley that starts on Sunday, Yorkshire’s final group game is at Old Trafford on Friday week, a Roses fixture that could potentially have the added spice of quarter-final qualification resting on its outcome.

We should learn much about Yorkshire in the next few days. Any team can have an off-day, of course, in any form of cricket, an unbelievably bad day, a day when the wheels come off, and none more so than in T20, when the margin for error is so small.

But if this is not to be like so many Yorkshire campaigns in this format of the game - very good in patches, very poor in others - then the response must be emphatic and swift.

In truth, Yorkshire have been heavily reliant on one or two players in the group stage thus far, players who had helped them to six straight victories prior to the Derbyshire game after the club began its T20 campaign with three straight defeats.

None more so than Dawid Malan, the opening batsman, who is the leading run-scorer in the country with 491 runs in 10 innings at 61.37).

Others have chipped in, shining here and there, but Yorkshire will not need telling that a step-up collectively is required after the record-breaking defeat that left some fans in Chesterfield chanting for a refund.