Time to come out of the closet

THERE is no choice. It's time to come out of the closet. I'm a Yorkshireman. Always have been, pretty much since the day I was born. It will invite all the usual prejudices - that all my kind are boorish, pig-headed and xenophobic - but I'm just going to have to live with it.

Common sense dictates that shouting your Yorkshireness from the rooftops (we don't say "one's Yorkshireness" up here in God's country) is best avoided. These, after all, are supposed to be the Sensitive Nineties. But every glance towards cricket's county championship brings on this irrepressible urge to brag. Second place, we proclaim, and despite worrying indications to the contrary, still rising!

England might have omitted to pick a Yorkshireman for the Headingley Test, but those who do turn up, grumbling, to the Great White Rose Refuse Tip will find plenty to console them. Conversation will not dwell upon Waqar's yorker, or Caddick's ears, but on weightier matters, linked to county not country: Silver Wood's outswinger, Vaughan's cover drive, Stemp's flight.

Frankly, you've no bloody idea about the problems of being a Yorkshireman (if you don't mind me saying so). We won the last of our 29 championships in 1968, a decade longer out of power than the Labour Party. Since then, we have learned to live with humiliation. Adulthood has not been one long party.

In all that time, the sneers have never stopped. Messrs Boycott, Illingworth, Close and Trueman are forever presented as representatives of a cussed and dogmatic breed, even though all are approaching pensionable age and only Close retains an active connection with the club.

The truth is, The Sensitive Nineties have reached Yorkshire. That and mobility of labour. The only player in the present side who truly represents the wise and cantankerous professionalism of old is Michael Bevan - and he is an Australian. Young Yorkshire players, politely making their way in the world, have shrunk from his moods like the most fearful Jane Austen heroines. It is embarrassing to admit it, but offer them a foaming pint of Telley Bitter or a bottle of Danish designer lager and the result is no longer a foregone conclusion.

About the only homegrown player to conform to type is the captain, David Byas, and even his Yorkshireness is that of the strong, silent Wolds farmer. He could single-handedly dig 20 sheep out of a snowdrift, stop a runaway tractor with his bare hands, and not boast about it once.

Whether or not this vulnerable, young team wins the championship, Yorkshireness is now synonymous with foresight. While British sport, disturbed by its Olympic failures, toys with sporting academies, Yorkshire are already enjoying the fruits of their own. True, its concept of a broad-based education might remain limited - three months of nets followed by half-an-hour on how to use a Visa card - but its results are undeniable.

Bob Appleyard, an England bowler of the 1950s, argued the Academy's case so persistently that golfing partners, having observed him slice his drive down the right, were rumoured to hook deliberately down the left. His legacy, though, will be immense.

More than 20 per cent of cricket is nourished in Yorkshire, vast proportions of it contentedly multi-racial. An Asian in the Yorkshire side will automatically follow. In the desolate years, the local leagues turned in on themselves.

Now loyalties are strong again; for Yorkshire to escape Headingley and start afresh on a new green-field site, they will need to be.

Those still convinced that "breeding will out," should consider Howard Wilkinson, the manager of Leeds United, whose very unpopularity arises from the perception that he is curt and contemptuous . . . precisely the qualities we supposedly cherish.

What Yorkshire needs is a slogan to ram the message home. Something harmless, inoffensive, bland. Something young and optimistic. How about "New Yorkshire, New Britain?" That should do the trick. Amazing we never thought of it before.