No longer bowled over by cricket

Did you know that there is still a Test series taking place between New Zealand and India? That the 2009 domestic season starts on April 9 with the County Championship underway five days later?
For the first time in many years, I didn't. For the first time in many years, I have yet to go out and purchase my copy of the 2009 edition of the Playfair Cricket Annual (Bill Frindall RIP).
As I write, the start of the Ashes series between England and Australia is 99 days away. Before then, there will be the Indian Premier League, a one-day international and Test series against the West Indies, the Twenty20 Cup and the Twenty20 World Cup with the County Championship shoehorned somewhere in between.
Those of us with Sky (either at home, or in the office) will be overwhelmed with international and one-day cricket; those without will be forced to search the broadsheet newspapers for coverage of our native counties whose teams we have supported all our lives.
The Post will, of course, maintain our usual high standards; whether other newspapers will do the same when paginations are being cut in straitened times is debatable.
In my case, it's the money wot's lost it. I can no longer take seriously an England team that seems to chase round the world at every opportunity to make a few more pounds, playing games when and wherever their television paymasters decree and making it impossible to keep up. Meanwhile, the international game has become so far detached from the County Championship which spawned its players as to make the whole thing unbelievable.
It seems to be so difficult to play oneself out of the privileged and preening England set-up as to make the county game irrelevant except to the few loyalists (and Post readers) who sustain it.
I write as someone who believes New Road, Worcester to be one of the greatest sporting settings in the country, if not the world. And perhaps my jaundiced view has been coloured by the struggles of Worcestershire chief executive Mark Newton and his colleagues to make the best of a nightmare situation over the last two flooded summers.
As a Worcestershire native, I am less troubled by Warwickshire's ongoing argument over ground redevelopment at Edgbaston but money also lies at the heart of that argument.
I am looking forward to spending a day or two at New Road this summer, hopefully in sunlit conditions not seen for the past three years. Perhaps my mood will have softened by then, but with the season just over a week away, English cricket has a great deal to do to draw me back into its spell.