To a long list of gruff, blunt and tell-it-like-it-is Yorkshiremen that includes the likes of Geoffrey Boycott, Raymond Illingworth and Brian Close, we can now add the name of Colin Graves - the current Yorkshire chairman.
Graves certainly didn't hold back when providing a frank, bloody and no-holds barred assessment of a disastrous season, which has seen Yorkshire plummet into Division 2 of the County Championship.
It's clear to see where Graves feels the fault lies. And it's not with him...
“It’s down to the players who have been on the park – nobody else,” said Graves. “The performances have been a disgrace; they have been unacceptable. The players need to take a long, hard look at themselves as far as I’m concerned.
“We’ve given them everything they wanted – contracts, salaries, we’ve given them everything. So they can’t turn round and say Yorkshire’s done this or Yorkshire’s done that.
“In the past, they’ve blamed the Headingley pitch and said we can’t get a result pitch at Headingley. Well, we’ve had bloody result pitches this year, but we kept losing on them.
“Don’t blame the bloody pitch, it’s not the pitch. It’s the fact they can’t play on it, that’s the problem.”
The disappointment is all the worse given that arch rivals Lancashire are fighting it out for the title against Warwickshire in the final match of the season - something Yorkshire were doing last year. Indeed, many (including Graves so it seems) felt that Andrew Gale's young side were likely to kick on this season, not collapse like a straw house in the face of the big bad wolf:
“Maybe we all got a bit carried away after last year and the expectation levels that were created,” he added in an interview with the Yorkshire Post.
“We ended up finishing third in the league and thinking, ‘bloody hell, we’ve got some world-beaters here’. In reality, we’ve performed poorly.
“Yorkshire should not be in the Second Division, simple as that. But the fact is, we’ve batted badly, we’ve bowled badly, and we’ve let teams off the hook. We’ve dropped bloody catches left, right and centre.
“What frustrates me is that we’re rewarding our players with good contracts, long-term contracts, and some of them have just not performed. And these are players who are, or have been, on the verge of the England team supposedly.”
It'll certainly be worth watching developments at Headingley over the next few months as with Graves in this sort of fire-breathing mode, heads are likely to roll.
Where next?
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