The Yorkshire captain, Andrew Gale, will call on his players to deliver a third successive County Championship title this summer as a fitting send‑off for their departing head coach, Jason Gillespie, who announced on Monday that he will leave the club at the end of the season.
Gillespie, 41, will return home to Australia in September, bringing to an end a five-year spell in charge of the first team at Headingley that brought instant promotion from Division Two in 2012 and then back-to-back Division One titles in 2014 and 2015. Impressively, the club have lost five of 76 championship fixtures in this time.
The former Australia fast bowler has taken the decision in order to be with his family, who moved back to South Australia this summer. While he will continue his role coaching Adelaide Strikers in the Big Bash League, further offers will be likely given the success at Yorkshire that led to his being linked with the England job in May last year and a role as the Australia fast‑bowling coach this season.
Smarting from the semi-final defeat against Surrey in the Royal London Cup on Sunday, the defending champions go into the County Championship fixture away against Hampshire on Tuesday five points behind the leaders Middlesex with four games to go;. Gale, who has been captain for the duration of Gillespie’s tenure, believes the club’s target of securing a first hat-trick of titles since the 1960s as now having an added incentive.
“This is a massive four weeks for the club coming up and we don’t want this news to detract from what we have got to do,” Gale told the Guardian. “If anything, it should galvanise us to send Dizzy out on a high, because he’s done some fantastic work at the club over the past five years.
“This will be the message to the players. It should bring us even closer together as a unit and see us want to win it even more.”
Liam Plunkett, the Yorkshire bowler, said: “I hope we can make it three in a row. That would be a nice note for him to leave on. I’m gutted. It’s a tough decision he’s made but I want to thank him. They took a chance at the club to bring me in [in 2012] and he has been nothing but positive for me and got me back playing for England.”
The club have stated that Martyn Moxon, their director of cricket, will begin the search for Gillespie’s replacement once the season is over, with the position likely to attract a number of suitors. With white-ball success craved by the powers that be at Headingley, their former spinner and second XI coach Richard Dawson will be high on the list of possibilities after he oversaw Gloucestershire’s successful Royal London Cup campaign last summer.
Paul Farbrace, the England assistant coach, will be another linked given his previous spell with the club’s second XI – though he signed a new contract with the national set-up at the start of the year – while Worcestershire’s director of cricket, Steve Rhodes, is another name in the frame. The former India and South Africa head coach, Gary Kirsten, is the most ambitious target to have been mentioned since the Gillespie news broke.
One man who will not be putting his name forward is Gale who, at 32, wants to continue captaining the club in first-class cricket for some time yet. But he hopes Moxon stays true to his word in placing the vacancy on the backburner for now with Middlesex, whom they play at Lord’s in the final round of the summer, needing to be pegged back.
Gale said: “The news is fresh at the minute and I would be disappointed if the club started looking for a replacement straight away. They need to get these four weeks out of the way. The last thing we need is speculation. We just want to concentrate on winning this championship.
“[Middlesex] are similar to us in 2013 when we lost out to Durham, who had the experience of winning titles and didn’t panic. They haven’t won the championship for a while so they will feel the pressure. They are playing good cricket but our players are coming into form at the right time. You can’t but think it will go down to the wire.”
Nevertheless, replacing Gillespie will take some doing. Unless a stellar name can be tempted, it may require a similar leap of faith as in late 2011. Then, newly relegated, the club turned to their former overseas player for a fresh outlook despite him having had only two years of coaching in Zimbabwean domestic cricket due to limited opportunities in Australia.
Colin Graves, the England and Wales Cricket Board chairman who hired Gillespie during his time in the same role at Yorkshire, said: “There were bigger players in the pot at the time but we felt it was right to go with Dizzy and it has proved correct. He was passionate about the game – that came across loud and clear – he wanted success and had a drive and initiative about him. He changed a lot of ideas and brought a will to win. Yorkshire owe him a big debt of gratitude.
“I don’t think it was inevitable we could have come straight back up without Dizzy. He was the guy that pulled it all together very quickly. The players responded to him. I’m not sure anyone would have done it as quick or as positively as he did it.”
