Surrey favourites again

Once upon a time the first round of matches in the County Championship was an eagerly anticipated rite of passage - the clocks may have come forward and the daffodils may have bloomed, but spring could not officially be declared open until the pavilion gates had closed behind the players and umpires.

It's all a bit different these days. An exhaustive glut of international matches has drowned out those first cuckoos, and more is in prospect, with England's Test and ODI calendar rammed to the gunwales from May to September. As a result, many of the country's top players will once again be forbidden by their contracts from turning out for their teams. If the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack served up a damning appraisal of the county game last year, this time around it has delivered an even more brutal snub - it hasn't even reached the nation's bookshelves in time for the start of the 2003 season, because publication was delayed so that the World Cup could be included.

The season - in case you blinked, or have been locked in a darkened room since the first Test at Brisbane last November - actually began last week, with four of the most untrumpeted first-class matches on record, between counties and university teams. But tomorrow at 11am, the real thing begins, and on the hottest April weekend in memory to boot. It is appropriate weather for a sport that no longer believes in an off-season.

That off-season does still exist, of course, although the behind-the-scenes machinations have been almost as exhausting as the winter's international treadmill. Leicestershire have undergone a coup de shire, with eight players, including the captain Vince Wells, driven from the ground amid mutterings about lawsuits. Graeme Hick has been sacked as captain of Worcestershire, Shane Warne was appointed - and hastily replaced by John Crawley - at Hampshire. And Phil Tufnell has chosen to face his demons Down Under, on the reality gameshow I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, rather than commence a 17th season at Middlesex.

But it is the structural changes to the county game that will cause the most upheaval in the coming months. Out goes the Benson & Hedges Cup, in comes the Twenty20 Cup, a mid-season, early-evening slogathon designed to attract a "new breed" of spectator, presumably the type with a short attention span. In the absence of any rest, a change will have to do, and it can only be hoped that the experiment is a success.

Another change, largely to offset the loss of so many international players, is the reintroduction of two overseas signings. Not since the heyday of county cricket in the early 1980s has such a move been permitted, but much of the lustre has since been removed. When international cricket was the exception, not the rule, the likes of Joel Garner and Viv Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Malcolm Marshall would light up the county stage. These have now been replaced, for the most part, by journeymen and greenhorns although, as in all walks of life, there are several honourable exceptions.

Inevitably, money matters have dominated the winter agenda. The announcement of funding cuts by the ECB - in the wake of the Zimbabwe affair - have prompted renewed speculation about the future of the county game. Glamorgan, who say they couldn't afford to hire a second overseas player, have mooted the possibility of a cross-border merger in the not-so-distant future. The two-division Championship format, meanwhile, is entering its fourth year, and by the end of 2002, the disparity between the haves and have-nots of the county game was becoming ever more evident.

The 2002 Championship was won at a canter - for the third time in four seasons - by county cricket's millionaires, Surrey, and it is difficult to look beyond them for yet another triumph. "We've been favourites for every game we've been in for the past four or five years," said Adam Hollioake, their hugely respected captain. "We just turn up and play." Turn up and play, and win, of course.

For Hollioake, 2002 was a year that began in desperately tragic circumstances, with the death of his brother Ben in a car crash in Perth. He took his time to return to the game, but then channelled his grief into some of the most spectacular form of his career. Surrey is a team moulded in his fervent image, and an outfit chock-full of international players can only be strengthened by Alec Stewart's likely retirement from England's one-day side, especially if Rikki Clarke and a rejuvenated Graham Thorpe - and possibly Hollioake himself, maybe even as captain - find themselves winging in the other direction.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lie Yorkshire, beaten and broke and riven with internal policking. The very year after claiming their first Championship for three decades, they were relegated to the second division, and an immediate return to the top is imperative for their new captain, Anthony McGrath, who took over after (but not, apparently, because of) Darren Lehmann's much-publicised PR failure against Sri Lanka.

Two fixtures stand out on the opening day: Essex v Middlesex at Chelmsford, where Ronnie Irani returns to the day job and Andy Flower begins life after that protest; and Surrey v Lancashire at The Oval, which already has the look of a potential Championship decider, even with Andrew Flintoff forced to sit out the match and Harbhajan Singh threatening to miss the entire season with a finger injury. In the second division, Jonty Rhodes and Jack Russell are threatening to form the quirkiest fielding and middle-order batting partnership since Derek Randall and mountain-climbing Bruce French left Notts, and their livewire personalities could spark Gloucestershire to more than just one-day trophies.