Yorkshire CCC has gone backwards after season to forget - Chris Waters

Or should that be Gale in?

Or perhaps Gale wasn’t so bad after all.

Take your pick.

But the familiar refrain on Twitter and elsewhere, pretty much every time that Yorkshire lost in recent years to the extent that it became a standing joke, has a somewhat ironic ring after a season in which the club was relegated from Division One of the County Championship.

Gale, as we know, was one of those sacked for allegations that he strongly and strenuously denies, allegations made by his former team-mate, Azeem Rafiq.

It is not the purpose of this column to go into all the off-the-field issues that were covered yesterday; why, the typewriter has only just cooled down after it was left in The Yorkshire Post freezer overnight.

But after five years without a trophy as Yorkshire head coach, Gale realised that he pretty much had to deliver one this year anyway. He could have accepted, had he not done so, if his time was then up, that every coach and manager has a shelf life.

It is worth recalling, when assessing Yorkshire’s 2022 season and putting it into cricketing perspective, that under Gale Yorkshire finished fourth in 2017; fourth in 2018; fifth in 2019; topped their group in the Bob Willis Trophy in 2020 before effectively finishing third, and then came second in their group last year before finishing bottom of Division One, not least due to a bizarre scoring system that meant that they carried through the fewest number of points.

Not brilliant, but certainly not bad. And a considerable improvement on what we’ve just seen.

This year, Yorkshire came second-bottom of a Championship First Division restored to a recognisable format after winning just one game (their first in April) and losing six of their last eight, a slump so precipitous that it was akin to falling off the top of York Minster.

By any standards, over the course of a 14-game campaign, the club has gone backwards and is now at its lowest ebb, in terms of its standing, for a decade. Indeed, if the England and Wales Cricket Board slaps it with any sort of points penalty due to the racism affair, it could struggle to make an impact next year too and will be further marooned among the dead men if the Strauss proposals take effect from 2024, when a top division of six clubs has been mooted.

Not a good time to be relegated, in other words; in fact, the worst possible time - especially for a club beset by huge financial problems and running a major Test ground, a club now rubbing shoulders - no disrespect intended - with Leicestershire and Derbyshire.

In defence of Ottis Gibson, Gale’s successor, it is frankly absurd that the club has had this ECB sword of Damocles hanging over it for an entire season, which has not made things easy for him or his staff. He has also been deprived of Gary Ballance, one of the main figures in the Rafiq affair, and a man whose runs would surely have kept Yorkshire in Division One, even though they were without England players at various times.

Gibson walked into a club which has been destroyed by the events of the past two years, with players wanting out, no medical staff in place last winter because they’d all been sacked, and huge internal discontent both with the club’s reaction to Rafiq’s allegations and then the hysterical overreaction afterwards so typical of our times. It wasn’t a hospital pass that Gibson received, because he grabbed the ball of his own free will, but you get the drift.

The first half of the season wasn’t too bad. Gloucestershire were beaten, although their strength was subsequently shown by the fact that they finished bottom, taking down Yorkshire at Headingley in the final game for good measure. Promising positions were forged in a number of matches - not least on the back of some much improved batting displays, albeit on pitches which, at times, were so bland that it was like earwigging a conversation in the Hawke Suite at Headingley.

In the season’s first half, Yorkshire’s batting was strong and their bowling less so; then vice-versa in the second half, when the likes of batsman Harry Brook went off to England and the previously injured bowlers Matthew Fisher and Ben Coad returned. The stars not so much aligned as misaligned.

In white-ball cricket, the club achieved its target of reaching T20 Finals Day - a fine effort and only the third time it has done so, losing to Lancashire in the semi-final. However, the objective of Darren Gough, the interim director of cricket, to radically improve Yorkshire’s white-ball record has not yet materialised; even in T20, Yorkshire’s form felt no different, by and large, to what it was before. His overseas signings promised much but delivered little; when considered overall, they should really have been paying Yorkshire rather than the other way round, with one or two probably in a better financial position than the club anyway.

Shan Masood is a good signing - assuming that he is not whisked away by Pakistan - and a largely young squad should be better for the experience. But season 2022 and the events surrounding it is not an experience that anyone connected with Yorkshire cricket would wish to remember.