THE best thing for myself and Yorkshire this winter is for me to stay at home and rest up ahead of next season.

I need to get away from cricket. I've had three years now where I've played non-stop and that means I'm a bit saturated both mentally and physically. Now I can go away before coming back ahead of 2016 champing at the bit.

Rest is important, no matter who it is. My plans are to put my feet up, go on holiday and ideally not pick a bat up until January.

If you look back over the last few years, there's not necessarily a correlation between going to the England Performance Programme and getting runs. You can probably look at it the other way around. I've had periods of rest before, come back and ripped it up.

I'm happy with how I've played in the second half of the season. I've been able to show some consistency again and have been hitting the ball nicely. In that regard, I'll be taking some positives.

But I'm just short of 800 runs in the Championship and for me, that's a really poor season.

When you reflect over the campaign, it's probably only two innings from getting to a thousand and I can take positives from the fact that I've played poorly in stages and I'm not that far away from a good return.

These things are part of your development as a batsman and opening the batting at Headingley isn't the easiest for even the most experienced players. I'll take that, move on and hopefully come back a better player.

It's been one of those years for me – but we've won the County Championship again and that's ultimately the main thing.

We appreciate how hard it is to win a Championship but now we have a formula where we know we can win it again. It's about having that belief and repeating performances.

We've shown we're a formidable side but the test now is to show that over a period of time.

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