Yorkshire elect not to pick up Roses gauntlet
Lancashire 494 & 232-3d drew with Yorkshire 360 & 188-0
YORKSHIRE first-team coach Jason Gillespie defended his side’s decision not to try to score 367 in a minimum of 71 overs and secure the win that would have cut Middlesex’s lead at the top of Division One to 15 points.
At tea Andrew Gale’s men had seemed to have laid an adequate platform for what might have been an exhilarating run-chase in the final session.
Openers Alex Lees and Adam Lyth had encountered few problems in steering their side to 148-0 and they therefore needed 219 more runs off 30 overs to complete what would have been a wonderful victory.
But Lees and Lyth merely added a further 40 runs in the evening session before, to the mystification of some of their own supporters, the draw was confirmed with Lees on 114 not out.
“Yes, chasing was in the back of our minds,” agreed Gillespie. “We thought we’d assess at tea, which we did.
“We thought, ‘let’s keeping batting and we’ll get feedback from Lythy and Leesy’.
“They are the two lads who were out there. Their feedback was that with the deteriorating pitch, it would be a big challenge for them to go for it, let alone a new batter coming in.
“If push comes to shove, Leesy and Lythy very much want to take the attacking option. But their feedback was the same. They felt that the pitch was deteriorating.
“There were a couple of those moments where we thought, ‘come on, we can do this’. If it was 40 or 50 fewer runs, absolutely we’d have had a crack.”
Gillespie’s view deserves both the greatest respect and serious consideration. This, after all, is the man who has coachedYorkshire to successive titles and may take them to a third, although Tuesday’s result makes that less likely.
Gale’s men now trail Middlesex by 26 points although they have next week’s game at Scarborough in hand.
But it is difficult to sustain the argument that it was going to be tricky to score runs in the last session of a game after the previous two had yielded 350 runs in 75 overs.
Moreover, Yorkshire’ s batsmen appeared to have been presented with something of a free lottery ticket
They had all their wickets in hand and could have given it a right old go, bolstered by the knowledge that they could have shut up shop when, say, three down, and taken the five points for a draw.
Finally, while no one is saying that it is easy to score runs in first-class cricket as it is in T20, batsmen now have a wider and more inventive range of shots at their disposal as a result of playing the short form of the game.
It can be phenomenally difficult to keep batsmen like Lyth or Jack Leaning quiet.
Perhaps fortunately for Steven Croft’s bowlers, that was not a problem with which they had to deal and it was no great surprise that Lancashire’s director of cricket, Ashley Giles, had a different take on the conclusion of the game.
“We were a little bit nervous sitting on the balcony,” he admitted.
“When they got to that position with none down we perhaps thought they might have gone on a little bit longer.
“But that’s their decision and nothing to do with us. We are happy to come out if it with a strong draw against a very good team.”