Sheffield Cricket Lovers' Society Year Book 2012

30 Sheffield Cricket Lovers’ Society I will be totally honest with my friends in South Yorkshire that the form of Yorkshire in 2010 and the superb attempt to win the title caught me by surprise. As I studied the runners and riders for the season of 2011, I did not expect Yorkshire to do as well as the previous year, but the major shock came with their season of despair which has led to relegation and quite a shake up at the Club. At the start of any season us folk in the media are invited to give our predictions. I felt Yorkshire would do reasonably well in the one-day competitions and would finish 4th or 5th in the Championship. I was surprised and shocked to see the fall from grace and the dreaded drop to Division Two. There was no consolation in the one-day competitions with the poor form mirroring the Championship demise. Below I list my views on why this has happened: 1. Jacques Rudolph left the Club and a huge gap had been created in the batting area. In 2010 Rudolph scored over 2,800 runs in all competitions and several other batsmen needed to step up to the mark to try and replace the South African run machine. This did not happen and when Jacques returned the trap door to Division Two was already ajar. 2. Yorkshire got in the habit of having dreadful sessions once again. These poor periods of play were in evidence in particular in the early fixture against defending Champions, Notts, the two fixtures against the old enemy, Lancashire and the Headingley encounter late in the season with Warwickshire. Perhaps the most disappointing of all was the one-day fixture in Holland where Yorkshire were frankly an embarrassment. 3. Too many players were out of form. Anthony McGrath struggled with injury, Adam Lyth could not recapture the remarkable form of 2010 and Adil Rashid and Ajmal Shahzad disappointed for long periods and never produced the consistency that was required. A number of bad habits, such as poor over rates in various matches, were picked up and so the season, which had started with such great hope, A Shock to the System David Callaghan Andrew Gale Anthony McGrath Adam Lyth Ryan Sidebottom