Byas hoping for a quick boost
Source -
yorkshiretoday.co.uk
David Byas believes the Twenty20 Cup gives Yorkshire a perfect chance to draw a line under their County Championship struggles and to salvage something from their troubled season.
Yorkshire begin their campaign this evening with a match against Durham at Headingley Carnegie, and Byas insists they can start afresh in their efforts to win some silverware.
Yorkshire are rock-bottom of the Championship First Division and have gone 15 matches without a victory in the competition, a sequence dating back to last July.
Director of cricket Byas said such weighty concerns would be temporarily put aside as his team shift their focus to the one-day thrash. "We've got nothing to lose going into the Twenty20 tournament," said Byas. "The Championship has not gone well for us so far and that is something we will be trying desperately hard to put right during the second half of the season."
"But the Twenty20 Cup gives us a break from all that and the chance to get some victories under our belt. To be honest, I'm hoping that it will be just the tonic we need. It might be the tournament that kick-starts our season.
"Although it would be ridiculous to pretend that we're going into the competition on a high following what's happened in the four-day game, maybe the lads will respond to a new competition and we're starting from scratch just like everyone else. I still believe we can salvage something in the Championship and as well as the Twenty20 Cup, there is also the Pro40 League to play for later in the year, so I don't accept our season is over."
This is the fourth season of the Twenty20 Cup, a tournament in which Yorkshire have yet to progress beyond the group stages. The 18 first-class counties are again split into three groups of six teams, with Yorkshire in the North Zone, and each county plays eight matches, with the top two sides from each group progressing to the quarter-finals along with the two best third-placed sides.
Byas said Yorkshire's game-plan would be based on instinct. "The key thing for me is that we don't over-complicate things," he added. "With Twenty20 there is perhaps a temptation to get too tactical about things and to over-analyse too much, but if a handful of players can come off consistently and if the others provide decent back-up, that is pretty much the recipe for success.
"That's the formula that has seen other teams do well and we certainly need our big guns firing. All I would say regarding tactics is that we need to be bowling better lines. That has really let us down in the Championship so far and we need to get it right in the Twenty20."
Advanced ticket sales are 26.4 per cent higher across the country than at this stage last year, while Yorkshire's match against Lancashire at Old Trafford on July 7 is already a sell-out.
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