WORCESTER rowers Pete Crozier and Jeremy Richardson face an oarsome' task in the Silver Goblets pairs at Henley Royal Regatta.

If the 2005 British club champions can get past Australia internationals Fergus Pragnell and Jason Heard in Thursday's first round of their 16-boat event, they are set to meet Australian world champions Drew Ginn and Duncan Free.

Pragnell and Heard finished 15th at last week's World Cup regatta in Holland and will be a tough challenge at the 168-year-old event for the Severn pair, who warmed up by finishing second on the London 2012 course at Marlow Regatta last week.

But two-time Olympic champion Ginn and partner Free, making their first appearance overseas this year, will be of another task altogether.

The Worcester duo are no strangers to Henley success, winning the Wyfold Cup club fours event at the world's oldest regatta in 2000.

Fresh from landing lightweight gold in Amsterdam, Worcester RC GB international Matt Beechey races in the other side of the draw with Daniel Harte, where they line up against London University old boys Andy Matheson and Gavin Weeks.

And, if they get through, they are also set to face Olympic heavyweights in defending champions Barney Williams and Scott Frandsen from Canada.

Williams, the winning Ox-ford Boat Race president in 2006, was the strokeman who famously pushed Matthew Pinsent's GB four so close at the Athens 2004 Games, losing out by just seven hundreds of a second.

GB cap Colin Scott from Malvern, who won the C' final in Amsterdam to place 13th ahead of China, Ireland and Egypt, races for Cambridge University in the Ladies Plate international club eights - an event he helped the Light Blues win two years ago.

And, after helping the Cambridge reserve crew beat Oxford in April's Boat Race, he meets them again in Friday's first round, albeit in a Dark Blues/Oxford Brookes composite crew.

Worcester RC coxless four Jed Greenhouse, Chris Beech, Andy Grant and Gareth Hooper face Belfast in their 32-boat Wyfold Cup opener tomorrow, in the event that gave the club its finest Henley moment seven years ago.

The club's men's eight face London C' in the Thames Cup club event with either Vesta or Americans Potomac waiting in the next round of their 32-boat event.

But Worcester world lightweight singles champion Zac Purchase, who took a second successive World Cup silver with Mark Hunter in Holland, and Wormington GB quadruple sculler Alex Gregory are not racing at Henley, keeping their powder dry for the third World Cup event next week in Lucerne, Switzerland.