YORKSHIRE captain Andrew Gale accepts that losing Jacques Rudolph will leave a massive hole in his batting line up next season, but he wants to fill it with a young talent.

It has already been well documented that the White Rose county are unlikely to be recruiting anybody else after the arrival of Ryan Sidebottom.

And Gale has earmarked Gary Ballance and Joe Root as two players who are ready to fill the prolific South African’s boots in 2011.

He said: “I’ve got two players in the second team who need an opportunity in Root and Ballance. I want to give them a decent run in the side.”

It seems as though Ballance, who played one Championship match last term, is first in the queue for a place.

“Gary is 22 now. He’s scoring runs in the second team, but he needs that challenge to go to the next level,” continued Gale. “He’s gone over to Zimbabwe and he’s got two hundreds already.

“I’m sure he’ll come back having developed more. He’s done as much as he can at second team level.

“Jacques got over 2,000 runs and we’re losing a massive player, but if we don’t find out about the young players, how do we know that they can’t score as many runs as Jacques did?

“They’re not going to come in and score 2,000 runs straightaway. But, if they get 600-700 Championship runs in their first season, they’ll have done their job.

“Then, the year after, they may get 2,000 runs.”

Yorkshire’s determination to promote from within will be music to the ears of the county’s members, who discovered earlier this week that 11 home-grown players, including Gale, have signed deals to keep them at Headingley until at least 2013.

One of those is opening batsman Joe Sayers, who missed the second half of the 2010 campaign with post-viral fatigue syndrome.

It was something which left him so tired that he struggled to even walk 100 yards.

Yorkshire return to pre-season training next week, although the 26-year-old has hardly done any fitness work since July.

Gale is hopeful that the lefthander will be fit for the start of the new campaign, but he cannot be sure.

He added: “I went to see him about a month ago, and he looked fragile. But he seems to have improved a lot over the last three to four weeks.

“He’s excited about getting back into training, but we don’t want to fly him back into it and suddenly he’s back where he was.

“These sorts of illness, some people have to manage it throughout their whole life.

“It could be a possibility that he’s not fit for the start of the season because he hasn’t done any fitness work at all since he finished playing in mid-season.”