By JMB
October 19 2006

Anyone surfing the various message boards and sites today would have cause to wonder whether Yorkshire cricket had died. We have had wall to wall speculation about McGrath and Lumbs departures, the new membership rates and people even offering to drive David Byas into the North Sea. This site is impartial and not prone to defending the club over fans, but we have sat here astonished watching normally rational human beings write off the 2007 season before most of us have started the 2006 Christmas shopping.

Yorkshire people tend to have two favourite hobbies - moaning and talking about the weather. Well we've got to October and the weather is going to be dull for quite some time now so the moaning season is in full flow. When it comes to Yorkshire cricket there could be a lot to feel grumpy about. The simple truth of the matter though is nobody knows what is happening and until we do (and that may not be until next April) the whinging is futile.

Perhaps Anthony McGrath is going to leave and if he does we will certainly miss his runs - look back on this sites archive and see the support we gave him this summer. We all felt here that he had done enought to stake a claim for an England spot so we'd much prefer him to be playing for Yorkshire in 2007. But then why is he thinking of going. Is the team management as bad as is being made out or is Mags just fed up that he is being passed over for the captaincy? We just don't know.

Is the team management / personality clashes which are so often cited as being the cause for popular players leaving the club as bad as is being painted? Or are the popular players just getting too big for their boots and demanding too much? Are the players unwilling to respond to poor management or is the management unable to get the players to work hard when they've been molly-coddled for too long? Is Lumb just guilty of being greedy?

Are people right in suggesting that the new membership system is unfair and over complicated or are they guilty of being anti-change and thus looking for complications when in reality few exist? Is the club ripping off fans by adding thirty or forty quid to a few peoples memberships or are they building for the future and taking the county in to the present century where it has so far failed to reach?

Like this article there are more questions than answers. By the start of next season we could have a vibrant young side along with a few experienced heads that could astound and entertain us all. The club has options. Players like Kent's released former captain David Fulton could see the Yorkshire captaincy as a challenge with which to end his career. Perhaps Younis Khan will be captain after all.

The current management system at Yorkshire is not perfect but who of us are. Byas has a gruff exterior but works hard and lets not forget has seen us promoted and retain division one status in the last two years. Stewart Regan has been a breath of fresh air. An experienced business man who has entered a club built on history, more prone to looking backwards rather than forwards, and taken it by the scruff of the neck. Do we trust these men who promise to deliver both on and off the field or do we panic whenever we read a headline that doesn't suit our mood?

Part of being a sports supporter is that we all think we can do the job better than those being paid to do it. Why not for once let the guys in charge prove us wrong? There's a long winter ahead of us and a lot can change. Six months are a long time in Yorkshire cricket.