Younis finds new twist to his talent

Yorkshire 299 and 439-4dec

Hampshire 296 and 366-8

Match drawn

Martyn Moxon, who has returned to Yorkshire's Broad Acres after a spell in foreign parts as Durham's coach, is a modest man. Asked how much of Yorkshire's fine start to the season is down to him, he replies: "Absolutely nothing". But he cannot be doing anything wrong, because Yorkshire won their first two Championship matches easily, and yesterday came as close as dammit to a third win against Hampshire, the pre-season favourites for the Championship.

Only a well-judged and cleverly executed stand of 33 for the ninth wicket by Nic Pothas and the unlikely figure of Stuart Clarke, the Australian seamer, kept Yorkshire at bay. There were 14 overs to go when Shane Warne was out for 33, but the pair survived the best of Jason Gillespie and Matthew Hoggard with the new ball, and then Darren Gough and the promising leg-spinner Adil Rashid. Yorkshire will have been disappointed not to force home their advantage in the last hour, but this was a first-class game of first-class cricket. And it will not stop the reporters who travel with the Yorkshire team continuing to talk, as they are doing so already - with becoming caution, of course - of winning the Championship.

They have many of the ingredients, no question, and one of the spiciest is Younis Khan, Pakistan's accomplished batsman, who guided Yorkshire into a position from which they could win on the last day by scoring a hundred in the first innings and a double hundred in the second. He is, incidentally, the first batsman in Yorkshire's colours ever to do so.

Yesterday it turned out that he is also an all-rounder. This might well have been news to Moxon and Gough. In his first-class career Younis, now 29 years old, had taken precisely 14 wickets for 831 runs. He bowls leg-breaks, and Darren Gough turned to him 10 minutes before lunch. It must have been an act of desperation, because he had already used seven bowlers to try to break a stubborn partnership between Jimmy Adams and John Crawley.

To the astonishment of players and spectators, Younis obliged by getting Crawley caught at silly point. And it did not end there. After lunch Adams batted on, now with Michael Lumb, Hampshire's post- season signing from Yorkshire, and as no wickets fell, Yorkshire's appeals grew louder and more regular - until Gough recalled Younis, who soon had Adams caught by Anthony McGrath at slip and Chris Benham shortly afterwards. This was not the way the game was supposed to turn out. Yorkshire had expected the wicket to turn malign.

Moxon thought 260 to 270 would be a par score in their second innings, but Yorkshire got to 437 for the loss of only four wickets. For malign, read benign. They have a forbidding line-up of fast bowlers, but they had assumed that the match-winner would be the 19- year-old Rashid, the great hope of young English spinners.

Rashid did turn the ball, but slowly. Crawley clouted him for six, though he deserved to be out next ball when he repeated the shot and just avoided an edge to the keeper. But it was not Rashid's day; there were too many four-balls and only one wicket-taking ball, after 26 overs. Gough used him again at the climax, but to no avail. He even brought back Younis, but his luck had run dry. Moxon notes that in his day Yorkshire never had one leg-spin bowler; "they were out of fashion". Now they have three - from the subcontinent, the African continent (Jacques Rudolph)... and Bradford. They took five wickets, but they were not enough.

Among the spectators was England's captain, Michael Vaughan, nursing a broken finger. He declined to come out from behind his shades to talk. But he limbered up, and Moxon said he had no yet ruled himself out of the First Test. Presumably, he feels he must live in hope.

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