IT MADE the ideal start if this is to be Yorkshire's year at last. To defeat Lancashire in a Benson and Hedges Cup qualifying match was the only way to purge the memory of losing two semi-finals at Old Trafford last season and of the unfriendly ridicule that rang in the ears of David Byas and his team.
On Wednesday, in their second qualifying match, it was back to earth as Yorkshire were beaten by Worcestershire on a Headingley pitch that died. Group A must be the hardest ever assembled, as it also includes Warwickshire and Australian-inspired Derbyshire, for which the presence of Minor Counties does not quite make up.
On Friday, when Yorkshire met Derbyshire, they won by the smallest possible margin. To reach the quarter-finals Yorkshire will have to beat Warwickshire tomorrow and the Minor Counties next week. Even then they may need to squeeze through on net run-rate.
Byas's immediate concern is that his batsmen have not yet found their touch, even though they set off two months ago on a pre-season tour of St Kitts and Anguilla. These small Caribbean islands could not by themselves offer first-class opposition. Yorkshire did meet Hampshire in Anguilla, but only at the airport, as the two counties headed in opposite directions.
But then Byas, 33, is fully trained in attending to the needs of a flock. He stands at slip, collar upturned, proud in his White Rose cap, a man of substance and massive strength: had Thomas Hardy been a northerner, Byas could have been his model for Gabriel Oak. If an outsider had to be brought in to captain England, he is one of the few county captains who has the stature.
He is one of those increasingly few men who still lives at the place where he was born, a 2,500-acre farm at Kilham in the old East Riding. Outside the cricket season, when he switches from bails to bales, he runs it with his brother and father, tending 200 breeding cows and 400 breeding ewes. He looks the sort of man who can carry a sheep under each arm because he does.
``From the time I was walking I was doing farm work, throwing bales about at harvest time.'' He was allowed space in Yorkshire's dressing-room when he started to make their first team as a left-handed bat. They just called him 'Bingo', after a pastime which is known in Scarborough, and did not fool around with him or his kit. During the bickering and back-biting of the last Boycott years he was able to stand aside and watch how things should not be done.
It was not farm work which developed his reflexes so much as table tennis during his teens until, he says, ``I could catch pigeons''. He played hockey for England Under-21s, captained Scarborough at 21, and did catch everything at slip but farming had its part in developing his understanding of human nature and preparing him for the Yorkshire captaincy when he was appointed last season.
``In any walk of life, whether you're looking to employ people to work for you on a farm or to play cricket, they have got to have something that you admire about them.'' A smile crosses the features which have had to withstand the wind off the North Sea on many a morning. ``People are like sheep. When one of them starts moaning, they all start. If one of them follows, they'll all follow.''
To this end, Yorkshire's mid-April visit to the austere surroundings of Ampleforth College in the lee of the North Yorkshire Moors was as useful as their Caribbean trip. ``We slept 12 or 14 to a room. It was like Tom Brown's Schooldays, but it was a great test of character.'' The whole squad went, down to a 15-year-old schoolboy from Yorkshire's academy, and they passed their tests of fitness as well as character. Time was, until recently, when the academy provided a better grounding in beer and chips than cricket.
This man of substance is presiding over a change from a determinedly laddish football culture into a more self-analytical and intelligent one, though the ultimate test may lie in the fielding: Byas estimates that Yorkshire last season dropped 20 crucial catches, of which 10 were of the dolly kind, which has to boil down to some lack of fibre. Byas sets an example by admitting responsibility for his own mistakes. ``If I make a mistake - and I'm no great tactician I'll put my hand up in the dressing-room and say so. But I expect them to do the same.''
Last summer Yorkshire went top of the championship table, at long last, until a disheartening defeat by Sussex when their seamers finally began to run out of steam. Byas might not have made the most of his spinners, Richard Stemp and Michael Bevan. If the Australian chinaman-bowler began with two or three overs of long hops and full tosses, Byas would take him off when Mark Taylor might have persevered.
This season, without Bevan, Yorkshire appear to be an attacking spinner light of a side to win the championship: to that end, it might have been worth waiting another month for Pakistan's original off-spinner, Saqlain Mushtaq, to become available instead of Darren Lehmann.
A mark of the match-winning captain is to pluck rabbits from his cap at the first sign of crisis. One such trick, to increase the spinning capacity, would be to use the slightly round arm off-spin which Craig White is planning to revive. When the Australian Under-19s toured the West Indies, their two spinners took an equal hand in winning the series - one of them White, the other Shane Warne.
Having to play all Yorkshire's home games at condemned Headingley, except for those at Scarborough, is not perceived as a hardship. Last season, for the first time, Yorkshire were able to use their own groundsman to prepare pitches as they wanted them. Byas is happy to play at Headingley while waiting for the new Wakefield stadium. ``We can't pass the buck any more. If we fail at home, either the players or the groundsman have got it wrong.''