This is not the beginning. Well, it is. Although, it never really feels like it. The County Championship eased into gear this week in a way that always seems startling, that for all its buds of life, always feels a bit like death.
Here it comes now out of the half-yearly gloom, that familiar tableau of white on mulchy green, the long spring shadows, with a sense from Old Trafford to Cardiff to Chester-Le-Street of something happening just below the daily noise, of scorecards to pore over, skittish runs, gallows humour, newspaper shots of triple-sweatered shapes against clanky steel and plastic stands.
