Preview: Northamptonshire v Warwickshire, County Championship

Rhodes "hungry to get going" after new deal

Warwickshire captain Will Rhodes wants his team to win the 'crucial' sessions when they visit Northamptonshire in the LV=Insurance County Championship over four days starting tomorrow.

chrisa

2022-06-25T16:00:00.000Z

Warwickshire captain Will Rhodes wants his team to win the 'crucial' sessions when they visit Northamptonshire in the LV= Insurance County Championship over four days starting on Sunday.

The Bears aim to hit back from their home defeat to Lancashire in the last round of red ball games two weeks ago. That was an excellent match, fiercely contested throughout and finely balanced until the last two sessions when the Red Rose closed out a four-wicket win.

The defeat left Rhodes' side slap-bang in mid-table, placed fifth in Division One, 49 points off top and 37 above bottom. With the table still so tight, the game at Northampton could heavily signpost the way for the Bears' 2022 red ball campaign.

"This will be an important week across Division One with some big games going on," Rhodes said. "When you are mid-table you always want to keep looking up rather than below so a good result in Northampton would put us in a strong position. Northants are a fine side who played really well at our place on a pretty flat wicket earlier this season, so we'll see what sort of track we get at their place.

"I was pleased with a lot of our cricket in the Lancashire game. We played some really good cricket for three and a half days. If you look at it session by session we probably won more sessions than they did, but in four-day cricket there are some crucial sessions and Lancashire won the last two. You have to take your hat off to Luke Wells and Rob Jones for how they played on the last day under a lot of pressure."

Rhodes' decision to declare on the third evening attracted some comment after Lancashire chased down the target. But Rhodes shares the belief of two of his predecessors as Bears captain - MJK Smith and Andy Lloyd - that there are times when you have to risk defeat to try to win.

Sometimes it come off, sometimes not. it certainly did on a sunlit day last September when Somerset were bowled out and the Bears clinched the title.

"It would have been very easy to keep batting into the fourth day and set Lancashire 380 and just take a draw," Rhodes said. "But we want to play positive cricket and that means sometimes you risk defeat to go for the win. That's what we did and unfortunately it didn't come off this time but there were lots of positives to take from the game."

Bears travel with a squad without Sam Hain and Liam Norwell (both sore backs), Danny Briggs (split hand webbing) and Ryan Sidebottom (calf strain) while England pair Olly Stone and Chris Woakes are not yet ready to return to red-ball cricket.

Young guns Chris Benjamin, Jake Bethell and Manraj Johal come into the squad, while senior seamers Nathan McAndrew and Craig Miles return to it.

"We are without some key players," said Rhodes. "But we have depth in the squad with some good players coming into it so we will have a look at the pitch and then see who we are going to go with."

Squad

Will Rhodes (C)Chris Benjamin Jake Bethell Henry Brookes Michael Burgess (WK)Alex Davies Olly Hannon-Dalby Manraj Johal Matt Lamb Nathan McAndrew Dan Mousley Craig Miles Dom Sibley

How to Follow

Members and supporters can follow the match live in our new-look Match Centre at edgbaston.com, which will include a free to watch Live Stream, with BBC commentary, and a live text commentary.

Supporters can get involved by sending their match day comments and thoughts to matchday@edgbaston.com, and we’ll publish the best ones on our live text commentary in the Match Centre.

Supporters can also watch the Live Stream and get instant push notifications of all wickets, innings and match results via the Edgbaston app, which is free to download on iOS and Android.

Match updates will also be available across the Club’s social media accounts, simply search for @WarwickshireCCC.