LONDON, CMC—Head coach Ottis Gibson said England batsman Joe Root’s availability for five of their next six English County Championship Division 2 matches was a welcomed boost for Yorkshire in their attempt to gain promotion back to Division 1.
The 55-year-old former Barbados all-rounder and West Indies head coach said Root will play his first county match since May 2022 when Yorkshire face Gloucestershire in their second-round game, starting on Friday at Bristol.
“It’s fantastic to have Joe back,” Gibson said. “He’s the best batsman in the world, and to have the best batsman playing for Yorkshire can only be a good thing.
“I say this all the time, especially with somebody like Joe Root, but it’s not just the performances that players like that bring. It’s their presence around the group, what they add to it, and the value they get to the younger players, especially.
“To have somebody like Joe is a fantastic thing all around, and hopefully, we can both benefit from him getting runs and confidence for Test cricket and ourselves in terms of him helping us win games that would put us in a perfect position going into the middle part of the season.”
The Root is set to bat at four between Pakistan Test captain Shan Masood and England teammate Harry Brook in a formidable middle-order that will help install Yorkshire as the favorites to win the match against Gloucestershire, who finished bottom of the division last season with no wins from 14 games.
“When people say we’ve got Brook and we’ve got Root and therefore we should win, that’s not how it works,” he said. “We still must go and play some good cricket and take 20 wickets to win the game.
“It’s nice to have those guys, of course, but everybody else will have a role to play in whether we win the game. We still must perform out in the middle, but it’s going to be great to have them around.”
Yorkshire will hope the weather is far better than last year when the corresponding contest was abandoned without a ball being bowled.
They also endured frustration with the adverse weather during their first-round match against Leicestershire this season on home soil.
Leicestershire scored 354 in their first innings before Yorkshire made 264 for six declared, and the visitors reached 26 without loss in the second innings of the soggy affair.
“There was a lot of frustration with the weather, but we got some time in the middle,” Gibson said.
“Our bowlers managed to get at least one good inning into them, and I thought we bowled well in patches, but there’s also some stuff that we’ll have to do better in the future.
“When we batted, Harry Brook made it look easy, and (former England opener) Adam Lyth also made an excellent hundred.”
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