WHAT Ben Coad and Matthew Waite have achieved during the first month and a half of the season has not only been great for themselves but also the rest of us young lads in the Yorkshire squad.

Coady is the leading wicket-taker in the County Championship and Waitey has proved to be an extremely valuable part of the one-day team during the last fortnight, performing with both bat and ball.

It has allowed Andrew Gale and Rich Pyrah to see that we can perform to a high level in first-team cricket.

With that in mind, we are all very confident we can still drive the club forward without our England players, who will be away now until at least the end of June due to the one-day internationals against South Africa and in the Champions Trophy. We kind of know what our team is going to be when they go and that helps a lot.

It was great to see Waitey score his maiden first-team fifty against Warwickshire at the weekend. He's been absolutely brilliant.

He has a great personality and is great to be around. He can act dumb sometimes but he's definitely cleverer than everyone thinks, having been close to him for a while now.

You can tell he's nervous at the start of an innings but as soon as he gets in, he strikes the ball as clean as anyone in our team – and that's a big rap when you think we have Tim Bresnan, Jonny Bairstow, Liam Plunkett and Joe Root around.

With his bowling, he wears his heart on his sleeve. He bustles in, hits a hard length and causes problems with his change-ups. He's a real fighter, which is what we want.

Missing 50-over matches against Northants and Warwickshire over the last week has given me the chance to have a look at what I've learnt in the games I did play and practice in the nets rather than out in the middle.

It's quite hard when the pressure's on in a game to go to something you've been working on. Quite often, you can go back to what you've been good at before.

But Galey and Rich have given all of us their full backing to use new skills in games. For me, it's also been perfect to refresh mentally and physically after my injury last year.

One part of the game I'm still learning about is how to deal with the mental side of things, switching on and off in between games to help me stay fresh.

It can be quite hard mentally in first-team cricket because there is massive pressure – and that includes things like the night before a game. You might not get to sleep as quickly, for example, because you're thinking about tomorrow.

Throughout the game, when I'm 12th man I can just relax a bit more because you're not really involved in the game. Obviously you want the lads to win and do well but when you're playing, you're immersed in every single ball of the match.

That's just how I am as a person. When I'm playing, it's quite tiring mentally – and before Northants last Wednesday, we'd just played five times in nine days.

It has been suggested to me that I'd be a nervous wreck if I was on 49 overnight waiting for a fifty the next day. But that's not true. I'd be absolutely delighted to have reached 49 in the first place, so I reckon that would be one occasion when I'd sleep like a baby.

I feel ready to play again now, though, and I would love to be involved in the Roses Championship matches over the coming weeks. They are the ones with the history behind them and the kind of games you want to be playing as a cricketer.

We're set up beautifully for them because I'm confident our white-ball form will transfer to the red ball. Hopefully we will beat them twice.

I just want to finish by passing on my congratulations to the Sheriff Hutton Bridge first team, who won their first match of the season on Saturday against Hull.

I went down to nets last week and they couldn't work out how they had lost their first three with the quality of cricket they had played.

But we all stayed behind, got some pizzas in, had a laugh and I knew then the win would come. Well done lads.