Old guard reunites as Yorkshire step up their title charge

Yorkshire 257 (Head 54, Barker 4-55) and 150 (Lees 70, Clarke 4-45, Patel 4-49) beat Warwickshire 179 (Clarke 50*) and 180 (Trott 59, Rashid 4-29) by 48 runsScorecard

Yorkshire will sense that a third consecutive County Championship title is well within their compass after climbing to third place with a victory that drew on tried and trusted ingredients. It puts them within striking distance of the two teams ahead of them, both of whom have played a match more and both of whom must still face Yorkshire for a second time.

There were no headline-grabbing innings, and never were there likely to be on a bone-dry pitch that was a challenge from day one, but the reuniting of what has been their most consistently effective bowling attack seemed to bring with it a fresh injection of self-belief. Ryan Sidebottom and Jack Brooks were back in tandem for the first time in more than three months, spurring each other on to excessively celebrated successes; Steven Patterson backed them up with his metronomic miserliness and Adil Rashid hoovered up the left-overs by bamboozling the tail.

It was a contest of narrow margins and important moments, none more so than the stunning catch at third slip pulled off by Jack Leaning to remove Tim Ambrose, breaking a partnership with Jonathan Trott that had added 91 runs and seemed perhaps to be tilting the balance in Warwickshire’s favour.

That gave Sidebottom a second wicket in the innings and a fifth in his comeback match. Shortly afterwards, Brooks, who himself has been off the scene lately with hip and thigh injuries, accounted for Trott for the second time in the match, again caught and bowled off a leading edge, which is certainly not a regular mode of dismissal for the former England batsman. It gave Brooks, who had dismissed Varun Chopra and Ian Bell in the same …

continue reading in source www.espncricinfo.com