Barney's Bears - the Warwickshire captain who commands respect

Behind every great team there is generally a great leader and Warwickshire's County Championship winning captain Ed Barnard is the latest to fit that particular bill.

To take over as skipper just a fortnight before the start of a new season, then lead your team to the Championship is the stuff of dreams.

For Barney's Bears to do it in the manner they did, winning their final four games, three of them by an innings, makes the 2026 title race take on even more legendary status.

From the moment red-ball cricket returned in August, Warwickshire won five matches and drew the other.

The first of those victories, a desperately tense one-wicket win over Sussex marshalled by last pair Chris Woakes and Olly Hannon-Dalby, was probably the one inspirational trigger point of the Bears' charge to the title.

But the coolest man on and off the field as the drama hotted up was 30-year-old Barnard, the Shropshire-born former Worcestershire all-rounder, who swapped the Pears for the Bears at the end of the 2022 season.

"He's just so consistent both as a player and a person," Warwickshire first-team coach Ian Westwood told BBC Radio WM.

"He's made my job so simple this year, with the high standards he sets and the way he leads from the front with bat and ball. He commands the respect of everyone in he changing room because of who he is."

There was also a lovely irony that, having won his only previous trophy as a Worcestershire player in 2018 - the T20 Blast - in beating Leicestershire last weekend, also at Edgbaston, Barnard was again in the company of the Pears' dual matchwinner that day, Ben Cox, now the Foxes wicketkeeper. A pair of once young tyros now all grown up!

The crucial run of four straight wins in September, also at Southampton, Cardiff and Chelmsford, was what catapulted Warwickshire from outsiders to a ninth title.

"Over the last month we've been exceptional," added Westwood.

"It seemed a long time to wait from winning at Chelmsford to getting the last game started and, when it became ours to lose, it added to the pressure. But Ed and the lads dealt with it all superbly."

Westwood - a Warwickshire title winner himself in 2012 - also acknowledges the part played by returning bowling coach Graeme 'Pop' Welch and Sussex-bound batting coach Matthew Walker.

"The bowling has got lots of plaudits and rightly so. Ethan Bamber, Woakesey [Chris Woakes] and Olly [Hannon-Dalby] have been brilliant and Manny Suthar has come in and given us just what we need," Westwood said.

"But we've done really well with the bat. We've played on a lot of bowler-friendly pitches and still scored the runs we needed."

All spearheaded by 1,048 runs from Sam Hain, at a stunning average of almost 75, a genuine beacon of consistency as he passed 50 in 10 of his 13 matches (two tons and eight half-centuries).

"Sam Hain has been like a man possessed," said Westwood. "He's the leader of that batting group. We couldn't have done it without him."