Lees delights in a rapid transformation

Suddenly Yorkshire are the masters of white-ball cricket. Alex Lees and his players will arrive at Edgbaston for Finals Day in the NatWest Blast expecting to do well and, to add to their pleasure, there is also a 50-over semi-final against Surrey in prospect.

But it was not always this way. Just two months ago Yorkshire’s best chance of getting points in the NatWest T20 Blast seemed to be an abandonment. So how has the team that was regularly beaten turned into the team to beat? What has changed?

Having won five of 14 games and finished next to bottom of the North Group in 2015, Yorkshire had won none of their first five matches this year (although two were abandoned) and seemed to have little chance of qualifying for the quarter-finals.

Then they played Derbyshire at Headingley on June 19 and, when rain swept across the ground, their nine-over score gave them a grimy one-run Duckworth-Lewis victory. That was the first of seven wins Yorkshire were to record in this year’s Blast and, following last Thursday’s demolition of Glamorgan at Cardiff, they will arriving at Edgbaston on Saturday in confident mood.

“I think most people were writing us off but we had that self-belief that if we got one win, we would get on a roll and do well,” said the T20 skipper, Alex Lees. “As a team we’ve bought into the ideology of backing yourself and backing your team mate. The key is to do the same thing when things are not going so well.

“We sat down and had a couple of chats and said that we knew we were better than the way we had performed. We’ve been poor since 2012. We’ve done it as a team, as a collective, and that’s our blue print.”

All of which is fine, of course, but rather similar things might have been said by any skipper whose county was playing pretty dismal short-form cricket. And yes, T20 is a game of frustratingly daft narrow margins. The key is to ensure that, far more often than not, you end up on the right side of them. The reasons go deeper than that.

Let’s go back to that game against Derbyshire because it was important for …

continue reading in source www.espncricinfo.com