Tales from the Long Room

Posted by Tony Hutton

Friday 30th April - Yorkshire v Durham at Headingley and Leeds/Bradford MCCU v Durham MCCU at Weetwood

Brian Sanderson has reported the detail of the game at Headingley so it only remains for me to do some sort of summing up on a strange sort of game. Yorkshire members as a whole are never happier than when they have something to grumble about and this game certainly produced a few talking points.

It seems perverse to complain when your side has scored over 600 runs, but many people, including myself, were rather puzzled at the time it took to score them. It was well known at the start of the game that the weather would be unsettled on the last two days, yet Yorkshire after a sparkling opening session got into something of a rut and proceeded at rather a pedestrian pace.

While acknowledging that Anthony McGrath has been out of form, he managed to score a century without looking really in. Even the admirable Rudolph, who scored a magnificent double century, seemed to take his time. However the most puzzling innings was that of Gale, who has done so well as captain, who did not seem to have any sense of urgency and perhaps should have declared much earlier.

Having said all that the rain of course had the final word, but there were lots of positives with runs from all the batsmen and some success from the new West Indian signing Tino Best and two beautiful wicket taking balls from Adil Rashid.

The rumour mongers were of course hard at it when the rains came with stories of alledged trouble in the camp due to the chief executive not voting in accordance with his board instructions at ECB meetings. How true that it will no doubt be revealed in due course.

At lunchtime with the possiblity of the follow on coming soon, I decided to have a trip up to Weetwood to see another one day University match, despite more coloured clothing of course. This time Durham appeared in an all purple outfit to upset one or
two of the diehard supporters which included John and Jennifer Ellison and Brian Senior.

Yet again there seemed a certain lack of urgency in the play for a 50 overs a side match, but Leeds/Bradford improved things in the closing overs with a few sixes from Ross Whiteley, a useful recruit from Derbyshire. A final total of 189 all out still seemed somewhat below par.

Doing some research on the Durham side it turned out that their wicketkeeper Atkinson has played one day internationals for Hong Kong and their opening batsman Waters has done the same for Kenya, both at very young ages.

We didn't get the chance to see Durham bat as the rains came down and we assume the game ended there, although still waiting for website confirmation that they did not return later.