ANDREW GALE says Yorkshire chairman Colin Graves’ stinging criticism of the county’s players is justified after relegation from the LV County Championship’s top tier was confirmed this week.

Graves tore into the squad, labelling this season as unacceptable and a disgrace.

“It’s some of the top players, some of the ones who have been in the England setup, who have let us down the most,” he said. “The players need to take a long, hard look at themselves as far as I’m concerned.

“We’ve given them everything they wanted – contracts, salaries, we’ve given them everything. So they can’t turn around and say Yorkshire’s done this or Yorkshire’s done that.

“If you look at it, we’ve got eight or nine players who’ve played for England in one format or another. And yet, as a team, they’ve performed badly this year.”

Despite having not read the comments, Gale responded: “You would expect that from any chairman of a club that gets relegated. I’ve said myself that we’ve only got ourselves to blame.

“The reasons why we’ve gone down are there in black and white. I firmly believe that the table doesn’t tell any lies. We haven’t been good enough. Full stop.

“It doesn’t really matter whether we finish bottom or second bottom. It’s irrelevant.

We’re down, and we’re going to have to cope with it.”

Graves also pointed to the state of Headingley’s pitches, which have been flat in the past but have been made more result-friendly this season.

There has been one draw from six matches there this season, but Yorkshire only won one and lost four.

“Don’t blame the pitch, it’s not the pitch. It’s the fact they can’t play on it, that’s the problem,” added Graves.

Gale, who has been one of Yorkshire’s better performers with 769 runs from 12 Championship matches, continued: “We’ve been asking for result pitches for a few years now, and we’ve got to find a way of playing on them now that we’ve got them.

“We’ve been on the wrong end of the results. We’ve got to learn to bat better. I think we bowled okay. I think there’s only a couple of teams that got 400 against us.

“We showed last week against Somerset that you can score runs when you dig in, grind it out and spend some time at the crease. But it is going to be hard work.”

Graves added: “After the expectations of last year, we thought we’d do reasonably well this year. Unfortunately it went against us, and we didn’t play very well.

“The senior players were the ones who we were expecting to perform, but they didn’t. Everybody who fits into that category will know themselves. They don’t need me to tell them. I’m sure Martyn Moxon has told them.

“It’s history now, and we’ve got to start looking forward.

Our pride’s hurt, but hopefully we’ll come back next year with avengeance.”