Taylor suffers grade two right hamstring tear

The competitive season starts this Sunday with a Sky Sports fixture vs Durham at the Riverside ground. Unfortunately I will not be available for selection due to a grade 2 tear of my right hamstring. I picked up the injury whilst on the pre season tour to Abu Dhabi and will overall miss a month of cricket. The last few weeks have been extremely frustrating!!

The Yorkshire tour to Abu Dhabi was an amazing experience. All the lads got some good practice outdoors which is impossible in England in March. I played in the first match, the Roses game vs Lancashire in what was a good win against a strong Lancashire side which featured Andrew Flintoff. The weather was great, the people really friendly, the hotel amazing and to cap it all we won the Pro Arch tournament – The first silverware of the season!!

Since our return from Abu Dhabi the team has managed just one day of cricket with 4 days of pre season friendlies being rained off. At this time of year any match play on grass is priceless to get back into the feel of being out in the middle and familiarise yourself with playing again after 6 months off. For me, this will have to wait another 10 days or so. It will probably mean a couple of games in the 2nd XI to prove my fitness and score some runs to force my way back into the 1st XI. The 1st team’s first Championship game is next Wednesday vs Hampshire. It should be a really good game as we have both Michael Vaughan and Matthew Hoggard available and Hampshire have Shane Bond, Kevin Pietersen and Chris Tremlett available!! I firmly believe the boys will take the points though if they perform the way we did in Abu Dhabi.

Away from Professional cricket, myself and Andrew have been developing and working on our cricket coaching business ‘Pro Coach Cricket Academy’. All the courses and Academies are in place and booked for next Autumn/Winter now. We have expanded to cover most of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. The website has also been updated and we are going to be selling cheap cricket equipment from the site http://www.procricketcoachingacademy.com in the next couple of weeks. We are also on the lookout for any other areas of the country that may be interested in us setting up coaching academies for their junior cricketers. Please get in touch at procoachcricketacademy@hotmail.co.uk .

Hope you have enjoyed reading my progress so far this season. I will be updating things again in a couple of weeks when I will hopefully be back playing!!