Yorkshire will, this summer, launch a talent identification drive across the five ECB Premier Leagues within the county, aiming to unearth previously untapped talent playing within the recreational game.
Players aged from 17-22 are being targeted as the club bid to deepen their first-team options in the coming seasons.
Harrison Allen, Yorkshire’s lead performance analyst, will look at the Bradford League, the Huddersfield League, the Yorkshire Premier Leagues North and South and the North Yorkshire South Durham League.
The Yorkshire Women’s Premier League will also be monitored.
Regular reports detailing performances will be sent to general manager of cricket Gavin Hamilton alongside men’s head coach Anthony McGrath, women’s head coach Richard Pyrah and James Martin, Yorkshire’s head of the performance pathway.
From there, players will be further researched, scouted and invited to training days at Headingley with the professional squad, paving the way for a potential professional career.
Here, we speak to Gavin Hamilton about Yorkshire’s exciting new project.
Picture by YCCC. Yorkshire’s general manager of cricket, Gavin Hamilton.
Gavin, can you explain a more about the Talent ID drive within the recreational game?
Basically, it’s analytical scouting.
First of all, Harrison will have an algorithm which monitors our five Premier Leagues.
League cricket in Yorkshire is amazing, and it would be remiss of the club to not have it sitting under our pathway.
It should be sitting under our pathway model, and I’m a firm believer that if you’re performing well, you deserve a chance.
We will be going into real detail and not just looking at weight of runs or weight of wickets.
That will be flagged, obviously, but the analysis will be around who a certain batter is playing against, what kind of pitches they’re on, where they’re scoring, who they’re scoring against. For bowlers, it’s what pace they’re bowling, what areas they’re bowling, how they get their wickets and in what phases of the game they get them in.
The criteria is for 17-21 or 22-years-olds, leaving it within that age-group.
The plan is for Harrison to produce a report every couple of weeks, which will go to myself, Anthony and Jimmy Martin. And hopefully one, two or three players will be flagged regularly.
Then we’ll send a scout to go and have a look at them and find out a bit more.
A part of that is that the players who are flagged have got to want to play professional cricket.
There are some who will be performing well and who will be highlighted who have good full-time jobs and don’t want anything more from the game than to play on a Saturday or a Sunday. We need to work that out by speaking to them and finding out if it’s something they want to pursue.
It’s really important that we set the ground rules well. As you can imagine, there will be people wondering why they’re not being looked at and picked.
But we will be very clear why we are looking and why we’re not.
Picture by Allan McKenzie/SWpix.com. Yorkshire’s lead performance analyst Harrison Allen.
Having identified certain players and scouted them, what is the next part of the process?
We hope to shortlist a group of players by the end of June, and then monitor their progression more closely.
The idea is that we will have a couple of open days in August, and those we’ve identified – it could be 20, it could be four or it could be one – will come and train with the professional squad. We will get these players in and challenge them in a professional environment.
Then, if things go well, we can get them more involved and they can maybe play some second-team cricket in September and we can work with them over the winter.
If we have found just one person at the end of this process, it makes it all worthwhile. I’m a firm believer in that. If we potentially bring somebody in from the leagues who goes on to play for Yorkshire next year, it’s a real sensible way of using the leagues as a pathway and a brilliant story.
Do you go into this process with an idea of the areas within your various squads that may need strengthening – certain roles you are looking at?
Absolutely we do. We know what depth we have going all the way down to 14-year-olds and up to the professional squad. There are a few areas where we now think, ‘We’re a bit light there’. In two years’ time, it might be that we’re somewhere else.
Rich Pyrah, our women’s head coach, has previously spoken about the need for spinners at all ages, and everybody is keen to recruit seamers all over the country.
That kind of thing will evolve as we progress with it.
Picture by Ray Spencer. Richmondshire captain Rob Carr lifts the 2024 YPL champions trophy at Castleford last September.
You mentioned there the women’s side of things. How will that fall into this process?
We’re planning for the women’s game to be part of this, without doubt.
But what I would say is that the structure of women’s league cricket is a bit different at the moment. It’s very good, but it’s not quite as widely spread in terms of the amount of leagues.
We will still be monitoring the Yorkshire Women’s Premier League, but not quite in the same depth.
I think things will be changing this summer, so we will play that by ear. Hopefully we can have two or three really good leagues in the women’s structure and really move forwards with it from there.
Having a year in Tier 2, we have this fantastic opportunity to get our Academy and Emerging Players Programme players involved in the professional game this year.
We want to open as many doors as possible.
If you look down all of your playing and coaching staff, even a vast number of the club’s management and office staff, league cricket has played a big part in their careers and lives. Do you agree with the notion that league cricket within Yorkshire is incredible?
100 percent.
Everybody who is here as coaches or management – myself, Mags, John Sadler, Rich Pyrah, Chris Brice, the list goes on – we all started in the Bradford League at 16-years-old.
Bar Mags, we all finished pro cricket and carried on playing afterwards in the Bradford League.
It means a lot to us, and the passion for Yorkshire Cricket is strong across the leagues. The love for Yorkshire Cricket and the desire for us to do well is so apparent.
As a county club, I think we need to engage more with our local league clubs in general. We have to rebuild those relationships, and it’s a great time to do it with some new faces at the club. We’ll see how it goes. It’s very exciting.
Picture by Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com. In 2011, fast bowler Iain Wardlaw was signed by Yorkshire having impressed for Bradford League side Cleckheaton.
Can you talk a bit about your own journey in league cricket?
When I came down from Scotland (in the earlier 1990s), I started at Pudsey Congs and then joined East Bierley, where I stayed for 15 or 16 years.
Now I’m at Guiseley, playing a bit of second-team cricket where my lad plays.
I also played for the Yorkshire Academy and, as a contracted professional, captained them in the league games we played.
I believe playing league cricket is the biggest learning curve you can have in terms of growing up.
I absolutely loved it. I loved the challenge of it, and I don’t think there’s a place in the country where league cricket is tougher and stronger than it is in Yorkshire.
Just digressing for a moment or two away from this analytical scouting initiative if we can. Up until 2021, the Yorkshire Academy fielded a team in the Yorkshire Premier League North competition. That no longer happens. Instead, the Academy are involved in national county competitions and allow the players to then return to their home clubs at the weekends to play Premier League cricket. Is that a model you, as a management team, are happy with?
I was a big fan of the Academy fielding a team in the leagues, but I do really like the structure that we have now.
Our Academy and EPP players are getting all the tools they need during the week, from our programme at Headingley, and then they get the chance to put themselves out there at the weekends with their own clubs.
That gives them the best of both worlds.
The only potential downside to it is that we need our players to stand up in certain situations – bowl in a said phase of the game or bat higher up the order so that they’re constantly challenged. That’s obviously not something we can dictate to the clubs.
But our players playing a wide range of cricket, learning and growing, outweighs those little negatives of not having full control, as we would if we were managing our own team on a Saturday.
Picture by Ben Duffy/SWpix.com. Yorkshire’s general manager of cricket Gavin Hamilton, back in his county playing days. Gavin is still playing for Guiseley’s second team on a Saturday.
Looking back a good few years to 2012, a Yorkshire first team went to Cleckheaton and played a Bradford League Representative XI as a warm-up fixture ahead of that summer’s T20 Blast. The likes of David Miller and Mitchell Starc were involved that night. Do you think something similar could happen in the future?
That kind of thing has happened two or three times that I can remember.
It’s all schedule based now.
We’re trying to get across the county by spreading the second-team games, spreading the Academy and EPP games around the leagues as much as we can.
Our Academy lads are going to play some T20s against league representative sides again this year.
Playing a first-team friendly or two is something we would be open to for sure, to potentially play a league rep side as a warm-up game. But we’ll keep an eye on the schedule and see where and when it fits. It’s on our radar.
Returning to the analytical scouting of the recreational game. You will no doubt get many a recommendation regarding players from league cricket within Yorkshire but also from outside of the county. Is this something Harrison could use if, for example, you came across a player of interest from say Shropshire, Birmingham or even, whisper it quietly, Lancashire?
More often than not, yes.
We should be able to get the data like we would for our leagues.
We would do exactly the same process. We’ll monitor him for one, two or three weeks and go from there.
I can’t stress enough that we want this to be part of our pathway. If it means going further afield, so be it.
As you say, we get many recommendations, and we want those to keep coming. We will then take it from there and do some digging.
Picture by Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com. South African overseas star David Miller played for Yorkshire in a first-team friendly at Cleckheaton in 2012.
And finally, what is your message to young and aspiring cricketers who are preparing for the 2025 season across the Yorkshire Premier Leagues?
If you get some runs and wickets, you will be on the radar. You will get flagged.
If I was an aspiring cricketer and somebody from Yorkshire had said this in March, that would get me going.
I would be sat there saying, ‘Wow, they’re genuinely looking’. And, yes, we are. We are genuinely looking because we want some good players from the leagues.
COVER PHOTO: Courtesy of Clifton Alliance CC. Captain Liam Green bowls for the 2024 Yorkshire Premier League North champions.
