David Byas is not seen as a gambler. But he took arguably the biggest punt of his time as director of cricket when, on August 16, he named his Championship team to face Kent. Byas included not one but two young legspinners, Adil Rashid, aged 18, and 20-year-old Mark Lawson. Together they were about o give Yorkshire’s Championship season a hell of a rip. In the event the weather wrecked the Kent match but in the next three games the charismatic pair shared 33 wickets in rain-affected near misses against Middlesex and Durham and a crucial win over Notts. But, if Rashid and Lawson inevitably hogged the headlines during the successful survival battle, the Championship season had been on an upward curve since the Twenty20 Cup. Beforehand the batting of Darren Lehmann and Anthony McGrath had been the only redeeming feature. After reaching the quarter-finals Yorkshire won three times in the Championship, the batting improved, the bowling was sharper and Rashid and Lawson arrived. Now for the bad news. One-day form was poor and Lehmann has departed, after ending his seventh season with an astonishing 339 against Durham. For Yorkshire Lehmann scored 8,871 runs at 68. Who says no one is indispensable?

Andrew Collomosse The Wisden Cricketer