Pujara cuts Hampshire down to size

It is rather easy to see why Yorkshire is providing English cricket with such a deep pool of executives, coaches and players.

This is a county where the game matters very much indeed to a large percentage of the population and where four-day games attract decent attendances. As Andrew Gale's team built a winning position on the third day of their match against Hampshire, one only had to visit the pavilion at tea-time to find the bars thronged with people escaping the westerly wind that had turned cool in mid-afternoon. All the chairs with a good view of the play were filled with people ready to resume watching Cheteshwar Pujara and Jack Leaning butcher James Vince's attack during an unbroken fifth-wicket stand of 95 off 72 balls.

When Gale called off the slaughter, Pujara had made an unbeaten 133 off 182 balls in what was his last innings for Yorkshire this season and he had provided discerning spectators with as good an illustration of how to play the cut shot as they are likely to see. Vince's bowlers may wake in the dead hours of the night with visions of being wristily conjured to anywhere between point and third man. More significantly for the game, Pujara's fine century had left Gale's bowlers with 21 overs in which they could subject the technique of Hampshire's top order batsmen to a tough examination.

The visitors found the test rather too rigorous for them. In the second over of the innings Jack Brooks's extra bounce was sufficient to catch the edge of Sean Terry's bat and fourth slip Tim Bresnan pocketed a good low catch. Next ball Michael Carberry was adjudged to have feathered a fine delivery to Jonny Bairstow, although there was some thought that he had not got a touch. Four overs later, Vince himself nicked yet another good nut from Brooks to Adam Lyth at second slip, and when Liam Dawson was lbw on the front foot to Adil Rashid for 16 three overs before the close, Hampshire's fate seemed all but sealed.

This, then, was the sort of day to which those Yorkshire spectators have become accustomed but it has not always been so. In 2011 the county was relegated from the First Division and as Gale skilfully defended questions about the possible recruitment of coach Jason Gillespie to the vacant England job, he also considered what had changed in Yorkshire since the bleak September when Colin Graves made some frank criticisms of the players.

"I think we have the right people in the right places," Gale said. "They say you've always got half a chance if you get the right people on the bus and after we were relegated, we got rid of some old faces and brought in some new people. We now have a strong stability in the club from the top to the bottom. There's an expectation that we will do well and we have high standards. And as we showed when we didn't select Liam Plunkett for this game, we're not scared of making hard calls if people don't meet those standards."

It might also be argued that Yorkshire have abandoned dogmatism. Long gone are the days when you had to be born in the county to play for it but there was still some comfort to be had in noting that seven of the side in this game were indeed Yorkshireman and that two of the other four, Jack Leaning and Will Rhodes, are products of the justifiably lauded Academy.

As for Hampshire, their players have made significant contributions to this game but they spent most of the day paying the penalty for losing their last six first-innings wickets for 32 runs, a collapse that was completed by Brooks and Rashid in the first 15 balls of the third day's play.

Vince's bowlers then removed Lyth, Alex Lees and Gale at a cost of 80 runs, only to find Pujara and Bairstow in their finest form. Indeed at one stage it seemed that Yorkshire's wicketkeeper-batsman might become the first man to score a century in each innings of a first-class game at Headingley. It is one cricket's more curious facts that neither the county's great batsmen nor, indeed, Don Bradman, have managed this feat. Having edged or gloved a sweep off Liam Dawson to Sean Ervine at slip when he had made 59, Bairstow must now wait for another opportunity.

It barely mattered in the context of the game. Leaning joined Pujara and the pair plainly enjoyed themselves hugely. As, of course, did the home spectators watching the game intently and clutching their hardback 2015 handbooks as carefully as if they were copies of the King James bible or the Book of Common Prayer. For all the hokum that still surrounds Yorkshire cricket, it suddenly seemed possible on this afternoon of blustery wind and White Rose dominance to see why people regard playing for the county as a calling rather than an occupation. The net may have been thrown wider but the summons to Headingley is still rather noble.