Summary
Only on the penultimate day of the season did Warwickshire avoid relegation from the top division of the Vitality County Championship. Seventh place and just a single win (over bottom club Kent) represented a poor return in the four day game.
There was more success in white ball cricket – but only up to a point. It has become almost a club tradition that they will perform well in the group stages of the Blast and the One Day Cup and then fall at the knock-out stage. The fact that this year they lost to the eventual winners (Gloucestershire in the Blast and Glamorgan in the One Day Cup) was scant consolation.
A glance at the four day averages reveals the harsh truth that the bowling fire power just wasn’t up to the task of taking twenty wickets in a match. Oliver Hannon-Dalby excelled. He once again reached 50 wickets for the season at 22 apiece. But the next highest wicket taker, all-rounder Ed Barnard, took only half that number. Four others had tallies in the teens. And what happened to front line spinner Danny Briggs? Eight wickets in eight games at an average of 87 each represented a real horror story. There were, of course, the usual “if only” stories. Had injuries not occurred to Chris Rushworth, overseas signing Hasan Ali and promising paceman Che Simmons, the attack would have looked much stronger and maybe results would have been better.
As for the four day batting, there were enough collapses and full or partial recoveries to fill several episodes of TV’s Casualty. But captain Alex Davies and ex-captain Will Rhodes both topped 1,000 runs in the Championship. Barnard and Michael Burgess averaged over 40 and Sam Hain, another who missed too many matches, almost hauled himself up to the 40 mark with an unbeaten hundred on the last day of the season.
It was Hain who dominated the Blast batting, averaging over 60. Moeen Ali only managed six games but scored the Bears’ only hundred, against Leicestershire. Jacob Bethell and Dan Mousley also made good contributions with the bat as well as taking useful wickets. Both of them were selected in England white ball squads, though only Bethell has actually donned an England cap so far.
Although the Bears brought in pace reinforcements for the Blast in the form of Richard Gleeson and George Garton, it was spin bowling that made the biggest contribution. Contrasting with his four day form, Briggs took 29 wickets and Jake Lintott twirled his way to 18. When, in the quarter final, the Bears bowled out Gloucestershire for 138, the win looked a formality. Not so, for the Bears could only stumble to 124-9 off their 20 overs.
In the One Day Cup, Warwickshire went one step further in surviving the quarter final stage before being well beaten by Glamorgan in the semi-final in Cardiff. Barnard led the team in this competition in every sense – he captained the side, averaged over 60 with the bat and topped the bowling averages with 19 wickets at less than 16 apiece. He was quite rightly declared Player of the Tournament. Rhodes, Michael Burgess and Chris Benjamin also scored useful runs. As for the bowling, spin was less evident than in the Blast with Hannon-Dalby and Michael Booth providing the main support to Barnard.
Results
Vitality County Championship: Seventh in Division One
Vitality Blast: Quarter finalists
Metro Bank One Day Cup: Semi-finalists
Leading run-scorers
Vitality CC: Alex Davies 1115 runs at 50.68
Vitality Blast: Sam Hain 569 runs at 66.32; Strike rate 137.43
Metro Bank ODC: Ed Barnard 433 runs at 61.85
Leading wicket-takers
Vitality CC: Oliver Hannon-Dalby 50 wickets at 22.28
Vitality Blast: Danny Briggs 29 wickets at 12.75; Economy 6.37
Metro Bank ODC: Ed Barnard 19 wickets at 15.68
Player of the season
With over 1300 runs and 44 wickets in all competitions, Ed Barnard qualifies as Player of the Season. His acquisition from local rivals Worcestershire in 2023 has paid off handsomely. At age 28, he is in his prime. He doesn’t seem to have caught the eye of the England selectors so he should be free to play a massive role for the Bears over the coming seasons.
Breakthrough Player
Several young players started to come though in 2024 – Hamza Shaikh, Che Simmons, Theo Wylie and Tazeem Ali are all names to note for the future. But if a single innings can signal a breakthrough, the award must surely go to Kai Smith. Warwickshire were chasing a Worcestershire total of 288 in the One Day Cup and were floundering at 77-5 when 19-year-old Smith came to the wicket in the 19th over. 30 overs later, he walked off having scored an unbeaten 130 off 104 balls and seen his side to a four wicket win.
Born and raised in Dubai, he has played for the United Arab Emirates under-19 team and was introduced to Warwickshire by ex-Bear and former UAE coach Dougie Brown.
Could have done better
Club captain Ales Davies and the coaching team headed by Mark Robinson incurred the wrath of supporters with some of their team selections. Why, they asked, was Ed Barnard only selected for five Blast matches when Chris Benjamin (now departed to Kent) played 15 times but only averaged 11? And when it became clear that the popular Will Rhodes was departing to Durham in large part because he wasn’t selected for the Blast team at all, more brickbats were hurled in Robinson’s direction. Bears fans are notoriously of a ‘glass half full’ mindset, but in this case, there did seem to be substance to their concerns.
Need to work on
Warwickshire have a tradition of employing successful overseas stars going back to the days of West Indians Rohan Kanhai and Alvin Kallicharran, followed by Brian Lara and Allan Donald. More recently, they enjoyed the best part of a decade of seeing Jeetan Patel wheel away with his deadly accurate off-spin. All the more disappointing then, that the Club’s overseas selections have failed to replicate that success in recent seasons. This year, Pakistan seam bowler Hasan Ali returned after some success in 2023 but an elbow injury cut his season short. New Zealander Michael Rae was a whole hearted trier as a fast medium bowler but hardly a star, and Zak Foulkes and Aamer Jamal came and went with little impact.
Finding another Jeetan Patel, let alone another Allan Donald or Brian Lara, may be an impossible challenge in a world where there are so many competing options open to top players, but other counties have done better than Warwickshire in this respect so the challenge is there.
What’s next?
Whilst it is normal for Warwickshire, along with other counties, to carry out a post-season appraisal of individual and collective performances, Chief Executive Stuart Cain has made it clear that this season’s review will be urgently undertaken. Mark Robinson and one or two of his coaching staff may be sitting uncomfortably in their seats. It would be no surprise if there were some changes before the start of next season.
Season Rating
As usual, this is difficult because of the contrasting red and white ball fortunes plus the group stage successes and knock-out stage failures. On balance –
Mark: 5.5/10
Mark Robinson methinks. Too much Neighbours?
I must have been dreaming of Neighbours and Kylie Minogue