North Group: Worcestershire 171-3 (Leach 63) beat Yorkshire 170 by seven wickets
Tim Bresnan’s second over in the Worcestershire innings pretty much summed up the day for the host team, it went: dot, six, four, four, four and yep, four as well.
Worcestershire cruised their way to an easy win over the hosts after they were set a mediocre 171 runs for victory, doing so in just 25.3 overs. Joe Leach and Tom Kohler-Cadmore led the way, with their 107 runs for the opening partnership putting the Pears in a position where they never looked back.
While the pitch was a little sticky, the Yorkshire innings was stunted from the start.
When the scoreboard showed ten overs and last year’s semi-finalists had only made it to 23-1, spectators will have been commenting that someone’s going to have to fire on all cylinders.
Gary Ballance, who has been in up-and-down form so far this season, looked in decent touch and it seemed he would be the king-pin of the innings. That was only the case until he reached 30, however, at which point he attempted to sweep across in front only to find himself out plumb lbw to Brett D’Oliveira.
The wickets just continued to fall after this point with Bresnan offering up a dedicated innings later which ended with him on 24 from 36, but he did strike one six.
David Willey – the man the Yorkshire CCC 2016 yearbook pins the ignition of their One-Day success on – was the only other man to strike a six in the whole innings and even he was unable to get out of the teens, dismissed caught and bowled to Daryl Mitchell.
However much the batsmen found it difficult, there is no denying that the runs were being prevented by the excellent Worcestershire attack. They bowled straight and accurately to ensure that Yorkshire’s search for runs was, in a nutshell, a struggle.
Jack Shantry was the pick of the bowlers as he finished with 2-10 from 7.2 overs but he was more than well supported by D’Oliveira, Leach, Ed Barnard and George Rhodes who made his first XI debut for the side.
All bar Barnard finished with two wickets with D’Oliveira the most expensive going for 49 runs from his allocated 10 overs.
The Yorkshire bowling attack needed to be as accurate and controlled in order to prevent the visiting team chasing down their 170 run total – from just 45.2 overs you should note – in record time. This was not to be the case. Worcestershire sent Leach and Kohler-Cadmore out to open the batting to get their innings off to the right start, and boy did they.
The pair shared an opening stand of 107 before Kohler-Cadmore fell to Liam Plunkett for 42. Leach would fall in the following over to Adil Rashid for 63 but the damage had already been done – between them the pair struck 15 fours and four sixes.
Yorkshire didn’t strike that many as a collective.
Rashid was the pick of the Yorkshire bowlers as he finished with 2-39 from 7.3 and was the only bowler to complete a maiden over at any point.
Fittingly, Worcestershire captain Mitchell was at the crease with in-form man Alexei Kervezee to bring up the winning runs which was done with two consecutive fours off the bowling of Rashid and the pair finished 23* and 13* respectively.