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The Yorkshire team’s Jonny Bairstow will make his season debut this week when the County Championship resumes after a six-week break.
Because of his England and IPL commitments, Bairstow has only appeared in two first-class matches for his home county since the end of the 2020 campaign. After taking a little hiatus from the game between the start of the Hundred and the T20 World Cup, he played for Welsh Fire and has yet to appear for Yorkshire in any format this season.
However, he will be back for Yorkshire’s match at Scarborough on Thursday against Sussex, as Yorkshire is now positioned just outside of the two promotion spots in Division Two. They can catch up to leaders Sussex this week, trailing them by just four points going into the final five games of the season. Middlesex is now in second position.
After failing to get forty runs during England’s tour of India this year, Bairstow was dropped from the Test team. He is not expected to play in the T20I and ODI series against Australia in September. Despite his declaration at the beginning of the Hundred that “all I want to do is play for England,” he could not muster much support for Welsh Fire, managing just 123 runs and one half-century in seven innings.
“I spoke to Jonny, and he still has ambitions of getting back into the England team,” Ottis Gibson, Yorkshire’s head coach, said last week. “When he was coming back from his injury last year, our medical team and coaches – everybody associated with the club – helped him get back into the England fold.
“If it’s that we need to do that again with him, give him some love and get him into a position where he puts good performances in, everybody benefits from that. Jonny Bairstow is a serious cricketer anyway, but when he has a point to prove, he’s even more dangerous. Hopefully, we can take advantage of that.”
After a shoulder niggle, Yorkshire stated on Monday that Bairstow is fit to play at Scarborough; however, his fitness for the next four games of the season is still unknown. This week, they won’t have their captain Shan Masood, since he is currently with Pakistan’s Test team in preparation for their upcoming series against Bangladesh.