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Worcestershire County Cricket Club

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

2024 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 squeezed on all sides by the ubiquitous white ball (bringing us another T20 World Cup this summer on top of the T20 Blast, the Hundred and the faded-yet-glorious One-Day Cup), yet for faithful Pears from Staunton to Dudley, from Tenbury to the lost lands of Stechford, Yardley, Moseley and Acock's Green, there's only one game in town this spring as Worcestershire tackle Division One cricket for the first time since 2018.

2023 became the annus mirabilis that no one expected, certainly after a miserable first six weeks in which the Pears had to thank the weather time and again for delivering us from defeat.  Only when the climate turned for the better in May did the Pears find their mojo in a dogged chase against in-form Leicestershire, and they never looked back. 20-over and 50-over quarter-finals followed, with Adam Finch going Carlos Brathwaite on Yorkshire one memorable Friday night in May, while the Championship wins continued to come courtesy of runs from the bat of Jake Libby and newly-promoted opener Gareth Roderick, while Matthew Waite proved the best replacement for Ed Barnard we could ever have hoped for. With the ball, Joe Leach had his strongest campaign in years, and Finchy got the chance to show for the first time how many scalps he can take.

Yet no sooner had the team started going places than its youngest, most promising members decided to go to other places entirely. Or rather, one place: Trent Bridge. It could be argued that on their 2023 returns alone Worcestershire have already proved they can do without Jack Haynes or Josh Tongue (though there's no escaping the fact that Dillon Pennington's wickets will be missed), and the exits of Pat Brown, Mitchell Stanley and Ben Cox are more of a white-ball concern; but nevertheless, the Pears have to roll up at Edgbaston this Friday and hit the ground running somehow with a team of whom half will be new faces. Not that the recruitment has been lacklustre - there are reasons to be cheerful over the arrival of Rob Jones from Lancashire, Tom Taylor and Josh Cobb from Northants, Ethan Brookes from Warks and Yadvinder Singh through the SACA pathway, with Nathan Smith and Jason Holder as the primary overseas complement - but the newbies have no time or leeway to bed in during a campaign which will be half over before midsummer.

The thankless slog of 2018, when we had a more settled side, lingers long in the mind, and we may well be in for more of the same this summer. But having done the unexpected last year, here's hoping we have a few tricks up the sleeve yet. Come on you Pears.