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Worcestershire County Cricket Club

County Champions: 1964, 1965, 1974, 1988, 1989
One-Day Champions: 1991, 1994
T20 Champions: 2018

2023 Season

It's that wonderful time of year again. Peter's cathedral soars, Severn gleams blue and wide beyond the score-box, and with the fierce midday sun upon the ground, through heat-haze comes the wary sound of bat on ball. The County Championship remains, for the time being, a two-division and fourteen-round competition, and though the ECB has seen fit to reduce the points on offer for a draw, Worcestershire will again be battling for a long-awaited promotion.

Not that all is smiles and sunshine at New Road.  The perpetual "period of transition" rolls on with all the transience of the Hundred Years War, this winter resulting in the replacement of head coach Alex Gidman with former bowling coach Alan Richardson - not the first time the county has ended a "global search" for a successor by miraculously unearthing the right bloke at the back of the Graeme Hick Pavilion - and a hunt for a dedicated director of cricket which remains ongoing, as Ashley Giles apparently had more sense than to say yes. Worse yet, 2023 is our first campaign in many a long year without the homegrown talisman that was Ed Barnard; replacement Matthew Waite has shown plenty of wicket-taking potential, but little sign so far of plugging the 800-runs-a-year gap that Barney leaves behind, and the rock-solid dam that stood firm after so many top-order collapses is simply no more. Perhaps the current top order is simply stronger than those of previous years: between them, Jake Libby, Ed Pollock, Azhar Ali and Jack Haynes proved a solid combination in 2022, and the second coming of Gareth Roderick in the autumn, beside the strong middle-order hitting of skipper Brett D'Oliveira, flooded the run-charts with extra tons.

All the same, Barnard outscored them all, and will be sorely missed.

Having struggled so much with bowling in 2021, there were signs of improvement last summer, and though Joe Leach may be starting to feel the years as he ploughs into his mid-thirties, Dillon Pennington is in the perfect position to capitalise on his annus mirabilis last year, while a simple Botox injection may have salvaged the career of Josh Tongue in 2022 just at the point when complications with an arm artery had him struggling with day-to-day life and looking to quit cricket altogether. Left-arm spinner Josh Baker is reportedly fit for the season's start after missing out on the back-end of 2022, while fellow cuddy-wifter Ben Gibbon showed immense promise and relentless application last summer even in the most thankless conditions, and will hopefully kick on this year.

The return of Yorkshire to the division will present its own difficulties this year, but with the White Rose not on our radar until high summer, there's plenty of chance for Worcestershire to get off to a strong start. Come on you Pears.