“It is an individual sport, but played as a team,” said the Pears’ much admired first-team coach Alan Richardson – as well respected, well liked and as key a figure as the club’s chief executive Ashley Giles. “And it’s really important the team work well together.
“I use the word character a lot but we’ve needed that in abundance this year. We’ve also needed a great captain in Brett, who has been a vital part in what we’ve managed to do. In fact we couldn’t have done it without him.”
The fact is though, the sign of any really good team is coming to the end of a summer and realising just how hard a job it is choosing a player of the season.
The Pears produced real run-scorers – Kashif Ali (767), Jake Libby (710), Gareth Roderick (695), D’Oliveira himself (518), including four key half-centuries in a row, the first three of them match-winners when the County Championship returned from its seven-week break.
But a better measure was how runs came all the way down the order – from all-rounders Matthew Waite, Ethan Brookes, Tom Taylor and their two foreign imports over the first half of the summer, Jason Holder and Nathan Smith, who did so well that he has now reportedly lined up to join Pears old boy Gareth Batty’s triple champions Surrey.
Wickets were spread about too – 27 each for Smith, Taylor and the retiring Joe Leach, 19 for Waite, 17 for Adam Finch, 14 for on-loan Surrey spinner Amar Virdi, 13 for Logan van Beek, nine for Holder, eight for Brookes and Ben Gibbon, and seven for on-loan Essex all-rounder Ben Allison, who will move to New Road permanently next season.
All missed bits of the campaign because of injuries – but it was the permanent loss of one of their number, young Baker, that maybe had the most lasting effect – as Worcestershire’s ongoing spirit in the sky.
“We’ve got a great team spirit,” D’Oliveira said. “But it’s when times are really tough you find out a lot about people. And we’ve just got some tremendous individuals at this club, from the bottom to the very top.
“It was quite emotional in our season debrief. We had to bear Josh in mind, as we have done throughout the summer.”
Team-mate Roderick put the tears behind him when he hit a fine century at Canterbury in the Pears’ first game back after the tragic loss of Baker and admitted: “We certainly felt his presence with us. The boys could all feel him sitting on our shoulders up in the dressing room.”
