Gough eyes strong final lap

2 April 2008

Darren Gough is planning to retire at the end of the 2008 domestic term © Getty Images

Darren Gough is hoping Yorkshire’s rehabilitation has been sufficient to allow him to retire at the end of the 2008 summer.

Former England fast bowler Gough will be 38 in September and will be able to look back on a career which has seen him take an England record 234 one-day international wickets in addition to 229 Test victims.

Having answered Yorkshire’s call in their winter of need - returning to Headingley Carnegie as captain in early 2007 - he also hopes to leave them in a happier, healthier state.

Nothing is set in stone for one of the game’s most infectious characters, who took 37 wickets in Division One of the LV County Championship last year.

“We will see how things are,” said Gough. “I have had a chat with Yorkshire - it is a difficult one.

“I want to do a job here; I got 70-odd wickets last year and was top wicket-taker - and it has to be the right time for me, the right time for the club and the right time for youngsters coming through.

“If the youngsters show promise then it is time for me to go - but if not, and if I still have a job to do I might do it.

Coach Martyn Moxon believes Gough is a fantastic captain

“But in an ideal world I would like to finish in September.”

Although Gough’s first season as a county captain tailed off somewhat after a rollicking start, the mood in the Yorkshire dressing room lifted upon his return from an Essex exile.

“He has got a very good cricket brain,” said coach Martyn Moxon, who was lured back to his native county at the same time as Gough.

“He has played a lot of cricket, and uses that to the full.

“He did really well last year, both as a captain and a player.”

Although Yorkshire have finished sixth in their past two campaigns, they won more games last season and proved harder to beat under the Gough-Moxon alliance.

“At the start everyone wrote us off, said we would have a terrible season and would go down - and by the end people were saying we had made a right balls-up, we should have won this and should have won that,” Gough recalls.

“It is amazing how people’s opinions change throughout the year.

“Martyn and I thought we had laid a great foundation.

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“Players had started to enjoy their cricket again, and that is why they brought us back - to develop spirit, get people to enjoy each other’s company again and enjoy their cricket.”

Togetherness is something Moxon has reinforced throughout pre-season, with the entire squad taken out to Abu Dhabi for the Pro Arabian Cricket Challenge in March, to formulate tactics for one-day cricket in 2008.

“For me it is making the change from being competitive to winning,” said Moxon.

“That is our next step. We proved we were competitive last year, and now it is about going that one step further to try to win something.

“Although the position in the Championship in 2007 was the same as the previous season, we obviously won more games - and we were in the hunt of winning the thing until the last week or so.

“We certainly became more competitive in one-day cricket; we were just a win or two from promotion in the Pro40, just a couple of wins from qualifying in the Friends Provident and quarter-finalists in the Twenty20.

“The natural progression would be to gain promotion from the Pro40 or win one of the trophies.”

Yorkshire will certainly have a potent attack in the early part of the season with South African Morne Morkel arriving as overseas player, Matthew Hoggard smarting from his England omission, Gough as bubbly as ever and Tim Bresnan recovering from a stress fracture of the back.

But it will be top-order hundreds and the emergence of younger bowlers which will be key to Gough fulfilling his intentions.