Yorkshire eyes the Tour de France

Apologies. The Northerner has been sunk in holiday torpor. Or to be fair, weeding the allotment, entertaining in-laws, all the usual weekend stuff. But sacre bleu! Here is news. The Grand Départ of the Tour de France may be scheduled for Victoria Square outside the mighty Hotel de Ville in… Leeds. Not this year, nor next. But a party of Tour organisers is planning to come to Yorkshire to talk about the possibilities for 2016. The Grand Départ is the opening two days of racing in the famous event, which I remember following with pins on a school noticeboard as far back as 1959 when I was nine. Every two years, this is held outside France and Leeds plus Welcome to Yorkshire , the county's tourist board, have perkily applied for the chance. Gary Verity, chief executive of Welcome to Yorkshire says: "Yorkshire's bid has been positively received by the organising committee at this stage." Riders would go zooming off to the Dales and the Yorkshire coast. If they feel in need of a challenge, then there's always Sutton Bank and the test-your-brakes descent from the North York Moors to Sleights. Welcome to Yorkshire is on a roll at the moment because for the second year running its garden at Chelsea Flower Show has won the People's Choice award, a public vote for the most popular garden. The exhibit, called the Art of Yorkshire and paying homage to the county's artists, is now going to be transferred to Wakefield to form part of the landscaping surrounding the city's new £33 million Hepworth Gallery. Owzat!? More sporting news: Northumberland's women cricketers are claiming a first with the supervision of a county league match by all-women officials for the first time. Umpires Gillian Woodley and Sarah Lee, who regularly take the field separately in the Northumberland cricket league , had their debut pairing in a match between a civil service X1 and Cramlington, nine miles north of Newcasle-upon-Tyne. Their handling of the game at Cramlington, which saw the home side win by seven wickets, was described as brilliant by the cricket expert at the Newcastle journal. Both women said that the players - all men - had responded in the spirit of the game, and everyone hoped that women_s involvement in the league will increase. Women's cricket has a venerable history in the UK with the first England-Australia Test series in 1934 and a reference as far back as 1745 to a game between "11 maids of Bramley and 11 of Hambledon, all dressed in white." I had hoped that this was in Yorkshire, which has both a Bramley and a Hambledon, but sadly it was down in Hampshire. But the two sexes have largely kept warily apart, with women umpires making progress in men's games only relatively recently. Woodley, who is 50, is a fully-qualified umpire passing her level two grade exams last year, while Lee is 19 and still an A-level student in Gateshead, with level one grading from the English Cricket Board "I once hated the sport and was becoming a cricket widow because my husband loves it," says Wardley, who lives in Gosforth. "I had to grow to like it just to see him at weekends. Umpiring was difficult when I did my first matches four years ago because I think some men found it hard to accept decisions from a woman. But I've shown I can do it now." Lee said first went to a cricket match at the age of three months because of her dad's devotion to the game. She says: "Cricket's in my blood because I've been on pitches and in pavilions for as long as I can remember. I'm young as well as being a woman, but the men haven't really given me a hard time. If they swear and forget I/m there, they always say: "Oh, I'm so sorry." Florrie Capp will be cheering in Heaven.