By Andy Wilson
“Team success usually brings individual rewards,” the Lions coach Mark Robinson stressed to the players in an early-tour meeting in their Johannesburg hotel, and he cited Yorkshire as the perfect example.
“They won the County Championship last summer, and they’ve got six players in this squad.”
But the Yorkshire influence does not end with those six – Adam Lyth, Alex Lees, Jonny Bairstow, Adil Rashid, Liam Plunkettand Jack Brooks.
Robinson himself has retained his Hull accent even though it is now almost 18 years since he moved to the far south to join Sussex, initially as a player and then moving on to the coaching staff first as an assistant to Peter Moores before taking charge in 2005.
He took 218 wickets in 90 first-class appearances for his home county between 1991-95, and for the last two of those seasons he was joined on the Yorkshire staff by a young firebrand from Castleford called Chris Silverwood – who accompanied him on the Lions staff for the first time in the early stages of this tour, as bowling coach.
The less familiar coaching staff also have a strong Yorkshire voice in Pete Atkinson, the strength and conditioning specialist who joined the ECB in 2012 after seven years working with various Olympic teams at the English Institute of Sport, and before that in rugby union with Leicester and Saracens.
He is originally from Halifax, like Lees, and the pair were exchanging Calderdale memories during the thunderstorm at the Wanderers on Saturday.
In addition Giles Lindsay, who is in South Africa as the squad’s performance analyst, is originally from Harrogate and has worked in both codes of rugby for Leeds, in union with the Tykes then league with the Rhinos.
So that’s a total of eight Yorkshiremen in the party, without including two of the six players who were not born in the county but would still be happy to swell the total to 10.
Liam Plunkett is from Middlesbrough, which used to stage Yorkshire home matches before Durham were granted first-class status, and is only a 30-mile drive across the border from Lyth’s home town of Whitby.
Like Jack Brooks, who grew up in Oxford and started his career with Northamptonshire, Plunkett has relished his two seasons at Headingley since the pair arrived together in the winter of 2012-13 – meaning that both would hand Yorkshire a large share of the credit for their Lions selection, even if they can’t technically be described as Yorkshiremen.
Stephen Parry, the only Lancastrian selected for Lions duty on this tour, will be seriously outnumbered when he arrives for the one-day matches later in the month.