Cricket the priority now for sporting all-rounder Rob Yates

Cricket is clearly the Warwickshire opener’s primary focus these days, yet it was just one of three sporting loves as a youngster.

The other two were football and tennis and Yates was pretty handy at both, to the extent he was briefly on the books of Manchester United.

“I don’t tell many people about that,” he says. “I was with Villa until the age of nine and, when they let me go, United picked me up.

“I used to train at their Walsall base because the rules meant you couldn’t travel more than 90 minutes from home. That lasted about a year. I don’t think my parents were all that keen on me becoming a footballer.

“Tennis was my main sport after that. At the age of 12, I was ranked 40th in the country in my age group. It was probably ahead of cricket for me until I got to about 15, when it came to a decision about which path I was going to go down.”

Now at the age of 22 and having established himself as one of the brightest young talents in the country, it feels safe to say Yates chose wisely. Warwickshire supporters who watched him score five centuries last summer to help the club win both the County Championship and Bob Willis Trophy will certainly agree.

Those achievements led to a call-up for the England Lions’ winter tour of Australia and Yates is one of numerous players across the country – and indeed several at Warwickshire – who begin the new season knowing a strong start could be enough to earn senior honours this summer. Not that he is going to let that cloud his thinking.

“I wouldn’t be playing the game if I didn’t want to play for England,” he says, when the inevitable question comes his way. “But that isn’t really my main focus at the moment. It is about scoring runs for Warwickshire, bettering some of the scores I did last year to make them even bigger and hopefully win another Championship. We talk a lot in the dressing room about thinking in the present and I try my best to do that.”

Impressive though 2021 was, Yates knows there is still plenty for him to work on. It is a remarkable statistical quirk, for example, to note that despite the volume of runs scored he only reached double figures in 11 innings through the whole of the season.

“It was all or nothing,” he says. “Part of that is the nature of the beast when you are opening the batting. You get the toughest part of it with the new ball.

“But naturally I would like to get past that and start better. I pride myself once I get in to make sure I just don’t reach 50 but get 100.

“The focus this year is on starting better and then when I do get to a 100 try to go even bigger. Then again, you would take scoring five 100s in a season. It is a nice place to try to build up from.”

What last season did deliver for Yates was a reaffirmation of ability after a difficult, Covid-hit 2020 season had followed his breakthrough 2019 campaign. Born in Solihull, he played youth cricket for Moseley CC where he was picked up by the Bears academy. His first taste of senior cricket, meanwhile, came in the Minor Counties Championship for Staffordshire, after being recruited by captain Kadeer Ali, then a coach at Edgbaston.

“That was good experience,” says Yates. “You get a really good quality of cricket but the extra competitive element you don’t always get in second XI games because everyone wants to win, no matter who you are playing.

“In the Minor Counties everyone is ultra-competitive. Everyone is playing for the win.”

Yates and the Bears did rather more of the latter than those outside the club were expecting last year, emerging from a group which contained defending champions Essex, before then beating Yorkshire and Somerset in their final two Division One matches to clinch the county’s eighth title.

The addition of Alex Davies to the top order and the return to fitness of all-rounder Henry Brookes means their squad looks stronger this time around.

“It is an exciting position for us to be in,” says Yates. “Hopefully we can show the country what we are all about. I think we are growing. We have Davo (Davies) there as a nice new addition.

“Even players like Henry Brookes who have had a run in the side before. Then the players who have played the last few years, you would like to think will continue to grow.”