Yorkshire stand every chance of staying wedged third from bottom of the Division Two table unless they beat Glamorgan in their final Championship match of the season, which begins at Headingley today.

Although Yorkshire cannot complain about missing out on promotion in a disappointing season, they are better than their current lowly position suggests and if they can make it into fourth or fifth place it would be a fairer reflection of their form.

The decimation by the weather of their last two away matches and the heavy defeat by Durham at Scarborough mean that Yorkshire have picked up only 15 points from those three games, causing them to lose their grip on fourth place.

But they will have to perform much better than of late if they are to beat Glamorgan, who are in a celebratory mood after clinching promotion on Monday, when they drew their game with Nottinghamshire.

Yorkshire's match with Glamorgan at Colwyn Bay was so badly affected by the weather that only 51 overs were possible, but England's Simon Jones still managed to make the top half of the Yorkshire order jump during nine hostile overs which brought him Anthony McGrath's wicket.

For Yorkshire, Matthew Wood and Australian Phil Jaques go into the game neck and neck in their race to become the first batsman to reach 1,000 runs for the county this season, Jaques on 936 and Wood 922.

Yorkshire's 19-year-old left-arm spinner, David Wainwright, from Pontefract, who made his first-team debut against Somerset at Taunton last week, has been upgraded from the Academy to a junior professional.

Ajmal Shahzad (Bradford), Chris Gilbert (Scarborough), Chris Batchelor (Whitby), Adam Lyth (Whitby), Steve Patterson (Hull) and Dan Conway will all stay as contracted Academy players in 2005, but there are no new contracts for Haroon Rashid (Bradford), Harry Anderson (Leeds), Neil Longhurst (Rotherham) or for Scholarship player Sarfraz Mahomed (Bradford).

Phil Holdsworth (Northallerton) and Anthony Daniels (Tadcaster) will move up from Scholarships to the Academy, while Liam Ineson (Wakefield), Greg Norton (Mexborough), Simon Tennant (Driffield) and Adil Rashid (Bradford) will remain on Scholarships.