Exclusive: Darren Lehmann "keen" to return to Yorkshire CCC

A few days on from the departure of Darren Gough, the former managing director of cricket, Lehmann is said to want to come back to Headingley.

The greatest overseas player in Yorkshire’s history - perhaps in county cricket history - is “keen to return”, The Yorkshire Post has been told.

There would, perhaps, be no more popular appointment with the Yorkshire faithful.

Gough’s departure has left a vacancy that will need to be filled, although that will not be happening in the short-term.

The club will take time to consider its options and also to save money; Gough’s £260,000-a-year salary made him reputedly the highest-paid director of cricket on the circuit, despite Yorkshire being in Division Two of the County Championship.

“We won’t be rushing into anything,” a club insider confided. “We’ll run it as it is for three or four months, and then we’ll work it out and assess what we need.”

Familiar names are being linked already, including those of Anthony McGrath and Jason Gillespie, while Lehmann’s credentials speak for themselves.

A former Australia player and coach, his attachment to Yorkshire was more love affair than anything.

In 88 first-class games for the club between 1997 and 2006, Lehmann scored 8,871 runs at an average of 68.76, with 26 hundreds, signing off with a phenomenal 339 against Durham at Headingley, just two runs short of George Hirst’s record.

In 130 one-day matches for the county, Lehmann hit 5,229 runs at an average of 49.33, with eight hundreds, including a Yorkshire record 191 against Nottinghamshire at Scarborough in 2001.

As he showed in such innings and plenty more besides, the left-handed Lehmann was something of a genius - at once brutally destructive and deftly sublime.

Now 54, he came back to Headingley three years ago to coach Northern Superchargers in The Hundred, but did not return the following year citing uncertainty around Covid-19 and quarantine/travel restrictions.

Lehmann has significant T20 franchise coaching experience too, most recently with Brisbane Heat in the Australian Big Bash.

Yorkshire have a separate first XI coach in Ottis Gibson, who was on the opposite side during the 339 and who has taken a pay cut during the last year of his contract.

Gibson will be expected to win promotion now that the uncertainty around points deductions caused by the racism crisis is over.

Meanwhile, Mark Arthur, the former chief executive who left his role at the height of the crisis in 2021, is one of six nominees to join the management board at Scarborough CC, which is this year celebrating its 175th anniversary.

Arthur’s appointment is set to be rubber-stamped at the club’s AGM on Monday along with those of Steve Denison, the former Yorkshire chair; Jim Love, the former Yorkshire batsman; Lady Rachael Boycott; Jemima Bird and John Spencer.

Sign up to the new Sports Editor’s Team Talk newsletter every Monday.