County Cricket Championship 2013 returns new hope and new looks

    

      

County Cricket Championship 2013 returns new hope and new looks

sports reporter(wp/g):::

Anniversaries are all the rage ahead of the start of the County Championship season on Wednesday, most of them 150ths. You will have done well to escape the momentous news that this year's edition of Wisden is its 150th, so efficiently has it been promoted, with the official launch rather unfortunately timed for Thursday morning – not great news for anyone hoping that the opening days' play in the Championship might receive much coverage in the papers.

Yorkshire and Hampshire are celebrating the same milestone, although without the daily plugs in the Times. No other media are allowed to carry any Wisden stuff until Wednesday's embargo but it feels more appropriate for The Guardian to dwell on another milestone that has been reached on the eve of the season.

Neville Cardus would have been 125 last Wednesday and the occasion was marked by a lunch in his honour at Old Trafford – now officially Emirates Old Trafford, as Cardus would not have called it. Michael Kennedy, the former music critic of the Sunday Telegraph, gave a speech to an audience that included representatives of the two Mancunian institutions with which Cardus is most closely linked –Lancashire and the Hallé. But the main purpose of the lunch was tolaunch the Neville Cardus Archive, which will be founded in the redeveloped Old Trafford pavilion when it is opened later in the summer. A good option for those rare occasions in Manchester when rain stops play ...

Heaven knows what Cardus would have made of Lancashire starting the season in Division Two or of the presence of a travelling Fun Fair on the Old Trafford car park. But that has now moved on and the ground is being prepared for Wednesday's opening fixture against Worcestershire, the other team relegated last season.

Spare a thought for the county groundsmen who, after enduring the miserably wet summer of 2012 – when their efforts were recognised by the Peter Smith Award presented by the Cricket Writers' Club for services to the presentation of the game – have shivered through what has so far passed for spring trying to ready their squares for the new campaign.

At the time of writing it is still forecast to be chilly but mostly dry at 11am on Wednesday. There is a full round of four fixtures in each division, withSurrey and Kent the two counties required to wait for a further week, and barring plague or pestilence our County Blog will be back on Wednesday morning.

Choosing three of the eight to cover was not easy but we could not ignore Derbyshire's first game in Division One for 12 years, against the champions Warwickshire at Edgbaston. Vic Marks is heading there and Richard Gibson will be on hand for the start of Yorkshire's 150th celebrations, against a Sussex team for whom Rory Hamilton-Brown is expected to return. Durham's opener against Somerset is also intriguing, not least because of the uncertainty over who will keep wicket for the visitors – Craig Kieswetter is expected to start with the gloves, which still suits Somerset best, however much England want Jos Buttler to be given more experience behind the stumps. Meanwhile Graham Onions will presumably be licking his lips about the return to the English conditions in which he prospered last year. If Marcus Trescothick wins the toss and chooses to bat, we could even have a Banger and Onions pun in the first over.

Apologies for ignoring Division Two in this opening round but that does not set a precedent for the year, honest. As ever, we will be relying heavily on our below-the-line regulars to keep us bang – OK, reasonably – up to date with whatever they have had for breakfast – sorry, what is happening around the shires – some of them doubtless helped by theBBC's ball-by-ball coverage which has been expanded to a new level of comprehensiveness this summer, terrific news for all lovers of the county game. Hopefully the original County Blog (it was, wasn't it?) can continue to be seen as a complement to that, even in a year when the Champions Trophy and especially the Ashes promise to dominate the cricketing landscape.