The season was not a month old when the penny dropped that a title challenge could be on.
Nottinghamshire, the county champions, were bolstered by the availability of England duo Ben Duckett and Josh Tongue for the end of April fixture. The ideal calibre of opponent against which to gauge their own credentials.
‘Something that we’ve spoken about as a team a lot is something you talk about a lot in Test cricket too – about winning windows of matches,’ says Chris Woakes.
‘There was a window on day one at Trent Bridge where we could have easily lost it and all of a sudden we’d have been right on the back foot in the game. But we wrestled some momentum back and put ourselves in a solid position.’
Indeed, with Tongue tearing in from the Radcliffe Road end, Warwickshire were reeling at 179 for six. But thanks to 165 from Ed Barnard along with half centuries from Woakes and Michael Booth, they posted 459. On the third morning, Nottinghamshire followed on.
The game ended in a draw, but it is a match that Warwickshire’s squad cross reference when asked to reflect upon their journey to a ninth County Championship pennant. That particular window had given them a glimpse into what was possible; they knew they had the players to go toe to toe with the best.
Across eight appearances, Woakes has averaged 25 with the bat and 24 with the ball. Solid rather than spectacular, but his mere presence has lifted others.
And it has been heartening to witness him return to the county scene. Twelve months ago, a left shoulder badly dislocated in a Test match against India at The Oval left him ‘worried that I might not play again’.
Warwickshire are winners of the County Championship for the ninth time
Veteran Chris Woakes returned to county cricket to fulfil his father’s dream
One of the motivations for extending his career beyond his 217 international caps was to honour his late father Roger, a huge fan of the club. He also wanted ‘to do the badge proud,’ saying: ‘I’ve been a Warwickshire man since the start. I walked through the gates at 11. So it just didn’t feel right to finish, really, in the manner that it did with England. Obviously that chapter has been closed, but I always felt like I’d like to leave the game the way I came in, which was obviously through the county grind.’
Walking away from the first-class game as a county champion represents a fitting farewell for one of cricket’s most respected competitors. Woakes will be 38 next season, but he has vowed to keep an open mind, letting the dust settle on this one first before considering becoming a white-ball specialist.
Woakes got his team over the line in what will go down as the pivotal match: the one-wicket nail biter with Sussex at Edgbaston in August, the first of five wins in an unbeaten ‘block’ of six Championship fixtures to finish the season.
In an encounter in which 207 was the highest innings score, Warwickshire needed 47 with three wickets standing, but Woakes kept his nerve with an unbeaten 23.
However, it has been his regular new-ball partner during this period, Ethan Bamber, who has given credence to a couple of cricket’s maxims: the Championship is a marathon not a sprint; and bowlers win you silverware.
At the heart of Warwickshire’s recruitment planning for 2026 was to expand their pool of seam bowlers. They secured their No 1 target in Yorkshire all-rounder Jordan Thompson on a big six-figure salary, lured the much-coveted England Lions player Nathan Gilchrist from Kent and brought back the experienced legs of Keith Barker, a Championship winner with the Bears in 2012, from Hampshire.
Ethan Bamber is the ‘workhorse’ whose bowling has set the tone for the team
Resources that offered them the opportunity to rotate the attack members, keeping legs fresh. None have featured during a hectic September, though. Thompson has remained on the sidelines, Gilchrist sent on loan to Leicestershire while it has been Barker’s first month of retirement after succumbing to a knee injury.
The Championship’s final stanza represents a punishing schedule of 24 days cricket out of 39, but the indefatigable Bamber has responded in the manner of another workhorse, George Orwell’s Boxer in Animal Farm, who met every demand for increased labour with the pledge: I will work harder.
‘I like to think I’m a good pro and I do the right things, but if I’ve got up at 8am and had a stretch, Bamber’s got up at 7am and run 20km. He is the best pro, you will ever come across in your life, I promise you,’ says team-mate Olly Hannon-Dalby.
‘He’s absolutely superb. There’s not a stone he doesn’t overturn to try to get the best out of himself. And from a physical, mental, tactical, technical point of view, he’s outstanding. So there’s absolutely no surprise the success he’s had this year.
‘I know there’s lots of chat about what succeeds at Test level and how fast you need to bowl, but for county cricket Ethan Bamber’s exceptional. He will hammer away for 20 overs a day, never loses any pace and threatens the top of off stump, both inside edge and outside edge.’
Sending down more deliveries than anyone else in the top flight has reaped its rewards for the 27-year-old Bamber. With 69, he finished as the leading wicket-taker across both divisions, backed up by the side’s outstanding slip catching. Rob Yates, at second, bagged an incredible 37.
Bamber’s arrival at Edgbaston was triggered by a woeful 2024 season for the club that saw them win just once.
Recognising the need for a strike bowler, they recalled the big impression Bamber had left, taking nine for 91 in Birmingham the previous summer. It was one of the last big cricket decisions made by the former performance director Gavin Larsen.
One of the best of a new regime that has come in for criticism – including the 31% rise in Ashes tickets prices next summer, a poor 2026 season in limited-overs cricket and failure to keep academy product Hamza Shaikh, who opted to move to Leicestershire – was a change of captaincy this March.
Barnard didn’t push for the position, but was identified as the right man to lead the team forward by the club’s decision makers: chief executive Stuart Cain, Larsen’s successor James Thomas and Ian Westwood, head the coach. Alex Davies’ resignation was announced on the eve of the season.
Barnard is a quiet, unassuming presence, leading by example on the field.
Some people think he has been too nice at times. One theory was that Thompson was bowling the overs that would ordinarily be supplied by Barnard during periods of the season.
Taking on more responsibility in Thompson’s absence, he took extraordinary match figures of eight for 18 in the crushing innings dispatch of Glamorgan a fortnight ago.
Davies – like Thompson another excellent servant of the domestic game, also lost his place in Warwickshire’s first-choice XI over recent weeks – but it should be acknowledged that as club captain for three years he was involved in foundational work for this success, including the signing of Beau Webster as one of the club’s overseas players.
Australian Webster proved less effective in his second season with the club, but is a popular character within the group. As is Manav Suthar, the India slow left-armer, Warwickshire secured in June, days before a Test debut that bore seven Afghanistani wickets.
Spin bowler Manav Suthar is highly regarded and viewed as the next big superstar
‘We were all panicking that he might not come over after that, that India would wrap him up in cotton wool, but luckily he did,’ says Hannon-Dalby.
Suthar claimed 11 victims in two mid-season appearances for Warwickshire and returned to Edgbaston once more after taking his Test haul to 23 in three matches during the away series in Sri Lanka.
His new team-mates reckon they have a future world superstar in their midst.
‘He rags it. You often talk about bowlers with regards to their accuracy, but he just spins it a long way. Even in warm-ups, if you watch him, he’s spinning it square,’ says Hannon-Dalby.
‘He’s a very cool cat too. Playing Test cricket for India at 23, in the IPL, wearing clobber in the changing room that I could only dream of. Gold chain, never takes his sunglasses off.
‘And he’s totally bought into being here. For example, on the eve of this last match, he was in the nets chatting to all our young academy spinners. Hopefully, there’s a relationship with him for many years to come.’
Hannon-Dalby is another of the Bears’ great storylines this summer. Deemed surplus to requirements in April, he was sent on loan to Worcestershire. Serving notice at New Road that he still had life in him at 37, he was recalled by his parent club for first team duty and handed a contract that will see him remain a member of ‘the bad lads’ – the collective term given to the club’s seamers by their exceptional bowling coach Graeme Welch – for three more years.
Like Suthar and Bamber, Hannon-Dalby’s Division One wickets have come at a cost of fewer than 20 apiece.
Along with Sam Hain, the only one of the club’s batsmen to reach the 1,000 run mark in 2026 and contributor of two of their minimalist five hundreds, Woakes and Yates, he was part of the 2021 title-winning squad.
Dramatically sealed on the final evening of the campaign, it was only Warwickshire’s eighth County Championship pennant in a competition that has been in existence since 1890 – a figure that perhaps undersells the size of the club.
‘Warwickshire is one of those clubs where there is arguably a bit more expectation to win things,’ says Will Rhodes, their captain that season and taker of the catch that completed the last-round victory over Somerset.
‘For someone like me who was never going to play international cricket, playing at the top end and winning the County Championship is the pinnacle of a career.
‘It takes a lot of luck, a lot of skill, but a lot of hard graft.’
Words that the winners of Warwickshire’s ninth will no doubt appreciate when they look back at those all important windows.
