Captain Andrew Gale is confident that his Yorkshire team will be better prepared for the forthcoming county season than they were last year.

Gale and Martyn Moxon were left frustrated 12 months ago as a number of things hindered their winter programme.

This included the absence of a handful of players on international duty until less than two weeks before their first County Championship match.

Gale was one of the players who toured the West Indies with the England Lions, while Anthony McGrath also missed out on playing a part in the club’s pre-season tour of Barbados due to injury.

But this time things are looking a lot brighter for Gale, Moxon and new first-team coach Jason Gillespie, who started his new job earlier this month.

They have a good mix of friendly fixtures at home and abroad, with matches against Derbyshire and Durham preceding the four-day opener against Kent at Headingley on April 5.

And theoretically, only Tim Bresnan and Phil Jaques should be missing when they board the plane to Barbados on March 12 as Jonny Bairstow and Joe Root will have completed their international duties.

Gale said: “I’d like to think we have every base covered this time. Pre-season was something that we looked at very closely after last year.

“There just wasn’t that freshness about last year for some reason and there’s been a number of things we’ve done to try and combat that.

“The lads didn’t even go to Headingley before Christmas. We did all our training at the David Lloyd gym so there would be a fresh feeling when they got back into it in the first week of January.

“When we started our cricket skills, you could see that anticipation about the season coming up. With a new coach as well, the lads are going to be busting a gut to impress him.”

After matches against Nottinghamshire and Hampshire in Barbados, as well as a two-day Twenty20 competition, Yorkshire play Derbyshire at the County Ground in a 40-over match on March 31 before travelling to the Riverside to face Durham on April 1 and 2.

Meanwhile, Ajmal Shahzad is currently in Dubai bowling at the England one-day squad. The fast bowler, who underwent ankle surgery earlier in the winter, has had his trip funded by the Yorkshire Supporters Association.