[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

One-Day Cup, Semi-Final

vs Somerset

New Road, Worcester

A miserable and frustrating season in Championship and T20 Blast, which looked all set to continue in the same vein in the One-Day Cup when Worcestershire scraped only a tie from the first match having posted a target of 327 and reduced Notts to 145-7 and 216-8 in the chase, implausibly gave way to an astonishing group campaign in which the Pears topped the table and booked a home semi-final, with a first List A final since 2004 at stake.

Worcs innings: Somerset won the toss and put the Pears in to bat on the sun-bright final day of summer, under a blue sky swimming with cotton-wool clouds. And fittingly enough, the first fifteen overs went swimmingly for Worcs as the openers scored at just shy of six an over until Brett D'Oliveira departed for 45, followed six overs later by an uncharacteristically subdued Kashif Ali, who took twenty-two minutes and twenty balls over his 6. But 19-year-old Dan Lategan, who made his big breakthrough over the course of the group stage, held the innings together through the middle phase and left a platform of 161-4 upon his departure to a dubious LBW decision for 78. From there it was a series of middle-order cameos keeping the scoreboard ticking, and the visitors would doubtless have been delighted by the regular clatter of wickets and subsiding run-rate; yet 275 always felt like it would be a competitive score, and Matthew Waite did his utmost to push the Pears within reach of it during the twenty-run penultimate over, before Tom Taylor helped himself to a maximum off the final ball and concluded the innings on exactly 275-9.

Somerset innings: Doubtless mindful of dark clouds on the horizon and feeling the heavy hand of Duckworth-Lewis on their shoulder, Somerset came out swinging at six an over, and its effect on the scoreboard came at the cost of four wickets in the first eleven overs for Khurram Shahzad, with Pingu supplying a fifth and Ben Allison a sixth and seventh before rain stopped play on 108-7, with Somerset fully 113 runs behind the DLS par. It was past six o'clock before the resumption, but already a foregone conclusion as the Somerset tail set about the thankless task of trying to score above eleven an over. Ethan Brookes, however, had other ideas, and his three wickets sealed Worcestershire's meeting with Hampshire at Trent Bridge in September; a first opportunity in twenty-two years to do what we haven't managed for thirty-one.

Worcestershire WIN by one hundred and thirty-one runs (D/L)

The Verdict: With relegation from Division One highly probable and an air of "why bother to begin with?" constantly plaguing Worcestershire's T20 efforts, it's been not just a consolation but a joy to see the Pears rediscovering their one-day mojo this August. Consecutive semi-final failures against Surrey and Kent in 2017 and 2018 left such deep scars that it was almost baffling to watch the team brush Somerset aside so easily in this one, but whatever happens on 20th September, the boys can be proud of what they've achieved in a summer that needed some good news.