Lees delights in a rapid transformation

Suddenly Yorkshire are the masters of white-ball cricket. Alex Lees and his players will arrive at Edgbaston for Finals Day in the NatWest Blast expecting to do well and, to add to their pleasure, there is also a 50-over semi-final against Surrey in prospect.

But it was not always this way. Just two months ago Yorkshire's best chance of getting points in the NatWest T20 Blast seemed to be an abandonment. So how has the team that was regularly beaten turned into the team to beat? What has changed?

Having won five of 14 games and finished next to bottom of the North Group in 2015, Yorkshire had won none of their first five matches this year (although two were abandoned) and seemed to have little chance of qualifying for the quarter-finals.

Then they played Derbyshire at Headingley on June 19 and, when rain swept across the ground, their nine-over score gave them a grimy one-run Duckworth-Lewis victory. That was the first of seven wins Yorkshire were to record in this year's Blast and, following last Thursday's demolition of Glamorgan at Cardiff, they will arriving at Edgbaston on Saturday in confident mood.

"I think most people were writing us off but we had that self-belief that if we got one win, we would get on a roll and do well," said the T20 skipper, Lees. "As a team we've bought into the ideology of backing yourself and backing your team-mate. The key is to do the same thing when things are not going so well.

"We sat down and had a couple of chats and said that we knew we were better than the way we had performed. We've been poor since 2012. We've done it as a team, as a collective, and that's our blue print."

All of which is fine, of course, but rather similar things might have been said by any skipper whose county was playing pretty dismal short-form cricket. And yes, T20 is a game of frustratingly daft narrow margins. The key is to ensure that, far more often than not, you end up on the right side of them. The reasons go deeper than that.

Let's go back to that game against Derbyshire because it was important for more than just the result. The game saw the return to Yorkshire's T20 team of Adam Lyth, whose confidence had received a fillip when he had hit successive 50-over hundreds against Northamptonshire and Lancashire a few days previously. Lyth blasted 30 off 16 balls, hitting three fours and a couple of sixes. Muck or nettles, he has carried on blasting ever since.

But the match against Derbyshire also saw the return to Yorkshire's T20 side of Azeem Rafiq, who had been released a couple of years earlier, yet whose form has been such since his re-engagement that he has been awarded his first-team cap. Rafiq is currently bowling his short-form overs at 6.9 runs apiece and he has taken 13 wickets, making him second only to Adil Rashid and Tim Bresnan in Yorkshire's list of successful T20 bowlers this season.

"Azeem was a revelation for us, particularly in those middle overs with Adil," Lees said. "He gives you consistency. His bowling has made my job a lot easier. I was assured he'd be back at some point in the next few years but I didn't know in what capacity and now he's been rewarded with his first-team cap.

"And the biggest thing for Adam is that he's been backed. There is a carefree attitude that we're going to go out and have a good time. The same thing can be said of David Willey, who didn't get the runs he would have liked early in the season."

There is a sense in all this that Yorkshire's cricketers have taken the brakes off in T20 cricket. Those brakes may not have been applied at all times in all games but they do not need to be. You only need to have four bad overs in the short-form stuff and it's Goodnight, Vienna.

Perhaps something of this approach was communicated to Lyth and his players by Kane Williamson, the New Zealand leader to whose team talks Rafiq has paid particular tribute.

"There's never just one voice in our dressing room," said Lees. "There are 11 players who voice their opinion and that's the Yorkshire way in all our cricket. Kane came in at the right time, he was a great character to have around the dressing room and he gave us a bit of direction as to the way we should go, particularly when we were unsure.

"Kane give us that calmness as well as his own view. We got on a roll when no one believed we should be at a Finals Day and here we are."

The results of any change of attitude have been different with each player but they have been particularly evident with two cricketers at very different stages of their career. Jack Leaning has found that hitting sixes is something he can do on a regular basis while Bresnan is suddenly mixing up his deliveries like a drunken postman.

"Jack's gone from nudging and nurdling it around to whacking it out of the park," said Lees. "He's found his method in white-ball cricket and that can only come from confidence and he's now very confident in that format.

"Tim is experienced and he probably looked at how he went last year and just adapted things a little bit. May be he has mixed it up a little bit. This year it seems he's bowling tight and he was exceptional in the game at Cardiff but in his own words his first ball was 'a pie' and he got a wicket with it. Last year, it would have gone out of the ground."

Liam Plunkett has been some rapid spells, proof that simple, searing pace has a home in Twenty20 and Lees himself, in his first season as a youthful captain, has worked on his own game well enough to enter Finals Day as Yorkshire's leading run-scorer.

Some would argue that Yorkshire are the form horses at this year's Finals Day and they will be boosted by the availability of Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow et al. Whatever else, they will play without fear and with a brio that was absent in the grim days of May and early June. It has been some transformation but at Edgbaston it will receive its most searching test.