YORKSHIRE captain Andrew Gale will walk out to the middle at approximately 10.30am tomorrow not knowing whether he will be tossing a coin or not.

According to Steve Patterson, the county’s fast bowler, that will not bother him one bit.

Hampshire’s James Vince has the option of bowling first. If he decides against taking it up, a toss will take place as usual.

The new ECB initiative is designed to encourage counties to produce better pitches for Specsavers County Championship matches as well as, hopefully, bringing spin bowlers into play more.

Vince, whose side drew with Warwickshire earlier this week, faces a tricky decision against the champions.

Does he go with the flow and bowl first, as a number of captains do at this time of year?

Or does he take his chances on batting first on one of the country’s better pitches?

“It will be interesting to see how visiting teams approach it because it’s not a simple decision at Headingley,” said Patterson.

“And sometimes when it’s not obvious, it puts you under pressure because if you bowl first, you don’t know what a good score is to bowl the opposition out for. If you bat first, what’s a good score for you to post?

“We’re not too fussed if they do want to toss or they don’t.

“We’re quite happy whatever because we know that if we play the cricket we’re capable of over four days, we should get a positive result.

“It was noticeable the other day in the three Division One games, everybody chose to bowl. There wasn’t one toss. Maybe that’s just an early season thing.

“I don’t think we’ll do a lot differently in terms of the pitches we produce and the way we play. We try to produce a good pitch to suit everybody.

“If you play well with the bat, you can score runs. If you bowl well, there’s something in it for you.

“Home matches, I don’t think it will affect us too much.

“If you look at the games we won last year, we lost a few tosses and still came out on the right side of the result.

“It will be more interesting to see what happens away.

“Having won the Championship in 2014, teams then produced very slow and flat pitches to try and nullify our seam attack.

“We don’t know whether that will happen again. But, at the same time, we’ve got probably the best spin bowler in the country in Adil Rashid. We’ve got all bases covered for any surface.”

If Yorkshire are not up to the standards that Patterson has spoken about, he knows they could be in for a difficult opening round.

Hampshire only just escaped relegation by their fingertips last year, but they gave Yorkshire something to think about in matches between the two.

“In the away game at the end of last season, they outplayed us really,” added Patterson.

“I know it was a shortened game, but they were certainly on top of us. We came up with a game scenario to get a result, and it ending up suiting us.

“They’re a dangerous side if you take them lightly.”

New signing David Willey has been named in a 13-man squad for the fixture, but he is not expected to debut.

Yorks 13-man squad: Gale c, Bairstow w, Ballance, Brooks, Leaning, Lees, Lyth, Patterson, Plunkett, Rashid, Rhodes, Sidebottom, Willey.