Matthew Hoggard has taken 7 wickets at
28.42 so far in the Championship season
BBC Radio: Link Edgbaston ground guide:Link Weather:Link Yorkshire CC form guide (Most recent last) D D D D D
League table: Link Yorkshire averages: Link Warwicks averages: link WRTV Video highlights: Link Warwicks website: Link Warwicks fan forum:Link Yorkshire's all-time CC record vs Worcestershire: P 178 W 77 T 0 L 30 D 71
Stats & Trivia:Yorkshire`s highest innings total is 887 against Warwickshire at Birmingham in 1896
Next Match : Monday, May 11 | FPT: Yorkshire vs. Gloucestershire (Bristol)
This message has been edited by AlexRoberts on May 6, 2009 12:56 PM
Well, at least we appear to be on our way to solving our first wicket woes. The 2009 story so far: 40, 29, 123, 93 average - 71.25 (vs 2008 season average of 16.63)
Sayers 52 not out. The last time both openers scored 50+ was in May 2007, against Worcs (Sayers and White), a game that we won by an innings and 260 runs. Two matches later Sayers scored his career best 187 against Kent. Today is his first CC 50 since then.
What's Mags' strike rate this season? I bet it would make Boycott look prolific. Hopefully he's not going to get bogged down and get out to a single figure score - we need him firing on all cylinders for the season.
I actually think mags is over analysing his game. He may have been over-coached over the Winter - he plays at his best when he simply hits the bloody ball....
perhaps our policy of playing 4 batsmen plus Brophy/Bres/Rashid in some games has affected the four batsmen to the extent that they have been taught to value their wicket more and the focus is on not getting out rather than scoring runs.
Sometimes when you look at the (lack of) batting still to come it can make you play more defensively.
it may also be the captaincy affecting his normal game as he won't want to throw his wicket away and set a bad example
joe sayers back to form with a fine hundred, after a miserable season last year he is showing great character this term. i hope mags follows him he has just hit a 6.
It's hard not to wonder if Michael Vaughan has lost it at the top level. Today's knock was just another in a long line of mediocre innings (he hasn't score a century for Yorkshire since 2003), and with Bopara seizing the chance MV must be very long odds now to resume his Test career against the Aussies. I wouldn't be surprised if Vaughan doesn't call it a day at the end of the season.
I don't know what game you were at, Niall, but from where I was sitting there wasn't much wrong with Vaughan's batting until the awful moment when he played one loose shot. He was just lining Woakes up nicely when the light meter readings suddenly plummeted and he played an instinctive cut shot in gloomy conditions that carried to Troughton at point. It was ironic that two minutes later the threatened rain came. Doubly ironic that it was actually lighter than this when the umpires took the players off for bad light after tea (at 245 for 2). And trebly ironic that Vaughan was the only Yorkshire batsman not to be given a life by Warwickshire, whose catching wasn't much above West Indian standards. Woakes, in particular, dropped a sitter off McGrath at square leg, when Mags, who was far inferior to Vaughan in the early part of his innings, had crawled to 20.
Just before the weather closed in, Vaughan had been looking reasonably free, playing one of those extraordinarily dismissive pulls off Woakes to the midwicket boundary, but he seemed to tighten up when it got dark (and windy and cold), realizing no doubt that it was a dangerous time. I get the impression he's still putting extra pressure on himself that's not helping his cause. It has to be said also that Sayers' reluctance to show much positive intent puts some pressure on his partners. I can see why Woakes was so devastating against the West Indians, as he is now getting sharp and late outswing to the right-hander. He couldn't get his line right to Sayers and Rudolph, but he was dangerous in a hostile spell at Vaughan just after lunch; it would perhaps have been easier for Vaughan if runs had been coming at the other end.
I thought Rudolph looked very good and very confident in the morning session, though it seemed as though Bell had taken him at third slip off Carter when he'd made 26, only for the ball to slip out as he hit the floor. It was a surprise when he gloved a ball from Clarke. Sayers was a mixed bag. He was very lucky to get away with an edge over the slips just before Vaughan was out, and in fact it was Vaughan, not Sayers, who seized back the initiative from Clarke after Rudolph was out. Sayers did play a glorious cover drive to bring up the 50 partnership with McGrath, but there was a very good appeal for a stumping the very next ball which I'm not entirely sure the umpire got right.
I notice someone suggested McGrath may have been batting slowly to give Sayers his head, as it were. I think it was simply that batting was harder for the right handers against Woakes in particular and, to a lesser extent, against Rankin and Patel. And, initially, MacGrath seemed badly out of touch. Sayers played more freely once he went past 70. He played an exquisite sweep to take him to 97 - the boundary fielder couldn't have been five yards from it, but didn't have a chance. All in all, then, congratulations to Sayers on a battling hundred. I'd have to say that I'd rather spend half an hour watching young Johnnie Bairstow than a Sayers hundred, but there were some shots of authority towards the end. The man has obviously turned his career around and for that he deserves considerable respect.
For those who are interested in omens, a large heron fought its way over the ground against a strong headwind just after Vaughan was out. In the gathering gloom, it did have the air of some kind of grim reaper.
Thanks for the time trouble and intelligence you used in writing that report.
I think Joe has had enough bad luck to be entitled to some good luck.
Vaughan is an enigma - he plays well every time I see him and then stupidly seems to get out. I always feel that he's due a century - and once he gets going the runs will really flow. But after a while it becomes harder to sustain this mitigation.
I'm worried about our scoring rate overrall - if we're going to spend the season drawing games then it's going to be essential to carve out as many batting points as possible.I suspect this will only be improved if Gale and Rudolph bat together - it's frightening how we now take Jacques' runs for granted...
Now then. About this heron. I see a thread developing here - we have a nesting pair of cranes and a red kite at Headingley - and Tyke 1950 has revealed himself as an ornithologist.
Are you sure it was a heron and not an albatros?
The rime of the ancient cricketer......?
I think we should leave Nico and her dyslexia out of this.
I'm not arguing that Michael Vaughan has come out of his run of bad scores in the championship. 16 is a mediocre score among a run of mediocre scores. I just think we should look at what actually happened, rather than get sidetracked by the "Will Michael Vaughan regain his England place?" narrative. That narrative skews things badly. We all know what the headlines would have been if Bopara had been out for a duck today and Vaughan had got a century. Deep down, we also know it's all a bit silly (It was interesting when Boycott was asked about Bopara's hundred today that he tried to point out that he had been very loose after tea and could easily have been out for 40. Of course, it would have been considered ungracious to emphasize that too heavily, but an analytical cricket-watcher notices how the luck falls and uses that in his/her assessment of a player's performance and ability).
To come back to the Yorkshire performance today, any team that dismisses Jacques Rudolph at the present time gets a big boost to their confidence. Clarke was getting some surprising lift, as had Carter, who wasn't the worst of Warwickshire's bowlers (despite having the worst figures for most of the day) and Woakes has just come off a destructive performance against the Windies. Vaughan came in at a slightly awkward time and steadied the ship. He was the solid player in this period and Sayers looked vulnerable. The Cricinfo reporter suggests that Vaughan "never settled" and that he played and missed twice. Well, a lot of players play and miss twice in an hour and it's easy journalism, retrospectively, to say someone "never settled" if you know that they got out for 16. The point is that Vaughan steadied things, counter-attacked pretty much single-handedly and then steadied things again when it got a bit dark. At the other end, Sayers quite frequently played and missed. After 40 overs, Yorkshire were 122 for 1. Vaughan had 16 from largely elegant, controlled strokes and Sayers had 37 off about four times as many balls.
It may be that Vaughan got out from tiredness or from a loss of concentration (which may be tiredness-related). In that case, injury and age may have taken its toll, as some suspect, and he may be finished at this level. Personally, I don't exclude that possibility altogether. But watching him today, it didn't look that way. In fact, it was easy to see how he got 80 in reasonably quick time the other day and it's not implausible to think he may do so again quite often.
Personally, I suspect that Vaughan is currently a case for paradox therapy. If he'll come out and say that he doesn't expect to regain his England place and isn't even thinking about it, it seems at least possible to me that his mind will clear and he'll score the kind of runs that will put him back in the frame. He still appears technically equipped to do that.
But for one stunning piece of fielding today from Westwood, Vaughan would have scored 20 before he was out. But for one awful drop at square leg, McGrath would have been out for 20 too. Vaughan's would have been the better 20, scored faster and in more difficult circumstances (partly because of the light and partly because Clarke was fresh when Vaughan came in). McGrath, who's pretty much on his "second innings", may get a double hundred tomorrow (I hope he does), but, at the deepest level, that won't change my opinion of how the two men batted. But, of course, it will affect the sloppy journalists' story immensely - and most of them are sloppy, because they can read a scorecard, but don't know much about cricket. Having said that, please read the account on the Cricinfo site, which represents a different, but perfectly valid point of view.
I don't want to give the impression that Sayers was painfully defensive. He played a number of attacking strokes early on and he never went entirely into his shell. Once he got past 60 or so, he became more adventurous and actually looked sharper (he was middling everything when the umpires took them off for bad light after tea). However, as Steve has hinted, it may be that we can't win matches batting at Sayers' pace throughout. Perhaps, as the season progresses, the issues that arise out of that problem will come to seem more important than "the Michael Vaughan story". I truly hope so, because, though Sayers' batting can be a bit boring, it's nowhere near as tedious as this constant "will he won't he?" narrative around Vaughan.
