And so Yorkshire’s God awful road trip comes to an end. Fifteen days that have included a Roses thrashing at Liverpool, yet another humiliation at Taunton and a narrow escape from an innings defeat on the south coast. Not quite the worst fortnight in the clubs long history, but far from being it’s best.

There was some consolation at least from the final day at Hove, with the team showing resolve and determination to bat out ninety odd overs and save a match that had looked all but lost just twenty-four hours before. That’s great, heartening even, but can we please stop getting ourselves into such hopeless looking situations in the first place? Because taken overall, this was another desperately poor performance from a squad with far more ability than they’re showing at present.

Whether our team selection for this match was part of the problem or merely a distraction is debatable. But there were certainly a couple of interesting choices made – and by interesting, I mean for many supporters they’ll be completely baffling.

I mentioned in my last match report that given his record at the ground, and the current form of Adil Rashid, David Wainwright should be the first spinner picked to play at Hove, and that if he didn’t get a chance here, he should start looking for another club. There’s been nothing during the past four days to change my mind about that.

I’m not saying the nine wicket, ninety-nine run performance I saw him put in during the same fixture a couple of years ago would have been replicated, but given Adil’s just got carted for one of the worst bowling returns in the county’s history, it’s hard to see how Wainwright wouldn’t have been an improvement.

Lyth’s omission for the returning Sayers is perhaps more understandable. The reasons given by Gale were that Adam keeps making starts before getting out to loose strokes – something we’ve all witnessed this season – and that despite numerous discussions, no improvement was being seen. It was made to sound like a ‘kick up the backside’ demotion; which is fair enough. But how you justify dropping Lyth when Mags has been in far worse form is less clear. Lyth at least looks one innings away from making his season click. McGrath’s fluency seems further on the horizon, although forty odd on in the second innings here may have gone some way to rectifying that.

Even so, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Wainwright and Lyth were incredibly unlucky to have been omitted, and, as it turned out, Rashid unlucky to have played.

Of course, Adil wasn’t the only bowler to suffer during Sussex’s mammoth first innings 548/4 declared. Collectively it’s one of our worst performances in the field for some time. But hard as it is to gauge just how much of a hangover Yorkshire took into this game from Taunton, having conceded the thick end of 800 runs for just four wickets in the space of few days, confidence amongst the bowlers can hardly be sky high.

Which begs the question why our two most expensive bowlers, Shahzad and Rashid, were made to bowl so many overs. Adil in particular was left on whilst he was being given some fearful stick. Last year I praised the way Gale let Adil bowl a long spell at Canterbury to work his way through some poor early season form; but this felt more like a process that would knock down confidence rather than build it up. Heaven knows where this leaves us with a bowler who should have been our trump card in the coming 2020. Heaven knows where this leaves us with an attack that now looks even more of a worry than our batting.

Oh yes, our batting. The underperformance continues, with the senior players being the main culprits. Once again they failed in the first innings. Once again it was the youngsters and lower order that bailed us out. Almost exactly half the runs we scored in this match came from Root, Bairstow and Ballance; 20, 21 and 21 respectively. With the half century from Steve Patterson in the first innings showing what should have been possible in reply to Sussex if we could cut out these mini-collapses we keep having. I could go on, but frankly I’m boring myself, and probably you as well, by describing the same failings over and over again.

The final day batting performance does show there are fighting qualities to Yorkshire’s squad, but the break for 2020 season couldn’t have come sooner. As at the moment the frailties of our batting are matched only by the lack of confidence shown by our attack.

We’ve got just over two weeks and half a dozen T20 games to regroup and prepare for the next championship match at the Riverside. Given Durham’s improving form, perhaps not the ideal fixture to get our season back on the rails.

Result: Sussex (10 points) drew with Yorkshire (5 points)

My Man of the Match: Murray Goodwin

[Scorecard]

Si’thee later,

Len

(Match Photos by kind permission: Dave Morton. Click on image for full size)