Captain Andrew Gale is confident that Yorkshire can still feature heavily in the Friends Provident Twenty20, despite two defeats from their opening two matches.

But the left-hander insists that a first win needs to come sooner rather than later, preferably in tomorrow night’s fixture against Durham at Headingley.

“There’s still 14 games left and that’s a lot of cricket to be played,” said Gale, whose side need to finish in the top four out of nine teams in the North Division to qualify for the last eight.

“But we don’t want to be going in at the halfway stage having only won a few games or even none.

“I think that if you do win a few games in this competition, it gives you a lot of confidence. There’s no reason why we can’t get on a roll.”

Gale believes it is difficult to assess which teams are the strongest in this competition, more so than in the LV= County Championship or the other one-day competition, the Clydesdale Bank 40.

The England Lions batsman said: “Anyone can beat anyone. We have played against Derby and Worcester. Some of their cricketers are nowhere near as good as ours on paper but some Second Division teams are really pushing along in this competition now.”

Gale, who has highlighted Phil Mustard and Ian Blackwell as the dangermen for Durham, also agrees with Martyn Moxon’s assessment that the White Rose county’s bowlers have been to blame for the two defeats.

“We can’t be chasing down 200 in every game. It makes it very difficult,” said 26 year-old Gale.

“I think we’ve been a bit one-dimensional in our bowling. We’ve had the game plans in place but we haven’t executed our skills.”

Yorkshire’s bowling attack will at least be boosted by the return of Ajmal Shahzad for their next two games, including Sunday’s match against Northamptonshire at Headingley.

Shahzad will find out tomorrow if he is in England’s one-day international squad for their forthcoming series against Australia but it would be a major surprise if he is not after his impressive Test debut last week.

Gale said: “He’ll be coming back full of confidence, and probably with the confidence we need in our bowling attack at the moment.”