The disarray in which the England team find themselves adds a certain spice to the onset of the County Championship season. No one, except perhaps the England and Wales Cricket Board bigwigs, knows the identity of the new team director and not even the new national selector, James Whitaker, could tell us which 11 players will be walking out at Lord’s when the first Test against Sri Lanka starts on 12 June.

Disarray can be entertaining on the outside; it also opens up opportunities for those on the inside to demonstrate why they should be given their chance at international level. There is uncertainty everywhere. Will Ashley Giles have a new job or no job? Will 37 overs of gross T20 incompetence against the Netherlands in Chittagong prompt a late swerve from the ECB’s wise men? The interview process starts this coming week and the appointment should be made by the end of the month.

But the decision-making does not end there. There is the little matter of who actually wears the England shirts in the coming season. Is Jonathan Trott really fit to play? And what of other recent Test players: Matt Prior, Tim Bresnan, Monty Panesar, Michael Carberry, Boyd Rankin, Scott Borthwick, Chris Tremlett and Steven Finn? The only certainty is that the England team of 2014 will not contain Kevin Pietersen, who will be kept busy with the Delhi Daredevils, the St Lucia Zouks and Surrey, who are basking in his surprising availability.

Perversely this chaos is stimulating. Already there has been extraordinary interest in the pre-season form of Trott and Prior, as if runs against the universities or in friendly matches against neighbouring counties are significant.

They are not, but the selectors will already be scratching their heads to work out how to rebuild England and whether it should include those two recent stalwarts. Who will augment Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad?  Who will open the batting with Alastair Cook? Around the counties there will be a dozen likely lads, who, if they excel in April and May, could be at Lord’s in June to play against Sri Lanka.

There are credible candidates out there, except in one department.  The sudden retirement of Graeme Swann leaves a quandary on a similar scale to that experienced by Australia after the retirement of Shane Warne. In Australia confidence in Panesar waned rapidly but it is tricky to pluck out other serious contenders. Moreover, England in April and May is rarely the best time for spinners to display their wares.

Runs scored and wickets taken in domestic cricket will start to matter. The Championship matches begin and the latest plan is that they start on Sundays for the bulk of the season. There are other changes to the schedule: the T20 competition has most of the matches (14 per county before the quarter-finals) taking place on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons; it is spread from May until the beginning of August and it is now called the NatWest Blast; 50-over cricket returns in the second half of the season replacing the 40-over format, a logical move but one originally opposed by many counties who calculated that this might result in a loss of revenue.

So some spring sunshine will be most welcome to allow England’s young (and not so young) cricketers a chance to blossom, to enable selectors, thrashing around for solutions, to witness some of their options in action and to act as a diversion from the interminable and increasingly insidious drip, drip of leaks from either side of the Pietersen debate.

There is more to it than that. There remains a band of people out there, a surprisingly large one, who are not so bothered with the politics and performances of the national side, but who have a devotion to their local county that is ingrained and absolute. They do not always turn up to their county grounds yet they barely miss a ball.

For them it does not matter so much who opens with Cook. The machinations at the top of the ECB leave them cold. But has the Ladies Pavilion at Worcester survived another drenching? How long is Ryan Sidebottom’s hair? Has Peter Trego found space for another tattoo over the winter?  And will their county side avoid relegation/win promotion or even prompt an autumn of ecstasy by walking off with a trophy?

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