Prize money, if not the title itself, will be at stake in all but two of the matches starting today. Kent v Gloucestershire, Surrey v Glamorgan and Yorkshire v Worcestershire are all heavyweight contests worth travelling long distances to see. If only the weather will allow fair results.

Matthew Maynard, the Glamorgan captain, will not decide until this morning whether to play the batsman Michael Powell or the seamer Darren Thomas at the Oval. Maynard will look at the wicket before making up his mind.

Gloucestershire are leaving out Nick Trainor, the opener who has failed to score in seven innings this season, for their match at Canterbury tomorrow. He will be replaced by Dominic Hewson, a 22-year-old right-hand batsman from Cheltenham. It will be Hewson's first championship game of the season. Last summer, he had five matches and averaged 22.88. The spinner Richard Davis is also added to the Gloucestershire squad.

At Headingley, Tom Moody, the Worcestershire captain, is expected to continue as an opener, while Tim Curtis, who retires at the end of the season, is again omitted from the team. Richard Illingworth, the England spinner, makes his return after recovering from a dislocated shoulder which had kept him out of cricket until a fortnight ago.

Those who believe that the rest of the county programme will be meaningless for the also-rans do not appreciate the importance of individual ambition within the team context. There are young players trying to take their chances; older ones hoping for new contracts; and several with higher ambitions in mind.

Tour selections will be announced a week today, so there is every incentive for those who have played for England this season in Tests or one-day internationals, plus those, like Dougie Brown and Ashley Cowan, who have appeared in the nets and know they are in the running.

There is just time, too, for a decisive performance from one or two of the tried and rejected players. There would be a case, for example, for Graeme Hick, Robin Smith and Ian Salisbury, all of whom toured the Caribbean four years ago. Nor should the fact that their seasons have been so spoiled by injuries eliminate two more recent England players, Nick Knight and Dominic Cork.

If Cork could rediscover the verve and consistency of his bowling when the West Indies were last in England two years ago, he would balance the England side and allow Jack Russell to return as wicketkeeper. Two members of the Social Statistics Research Unit at the City University, Simon Gleave and Ian Kennedy, have concluded that the difference between Australia and England this summer had as much to do with the greater success of Australia's numbers seven to nine as it did with the discrepancy between the performances of the top six batsmen.

Four-day county cricket was partly introduced to improve middle and lower-order batting but from seven to 11 in the order, England averaged 7.4 per man compared to Australia's 16.5. Because of the frail tail, the top six would have had to have outscored their Aussie counterparts by eight runs per batting position in every innings simply to compete on equal terms. That is not as simple as it sounds however: would the likes of Mark Ealham, Andy Caddick and Robert Croft have performed with the bat as effectively as Ian Healy, Paul Reiffel and Shane Warne if they had been batting against their own bowling?

Perhaps the delegates at Lord's today will see this is an argument for a greater concentration of the best players in our domestic game. If so, the regional idea having been rejected, this appears to lead, unfortunately for the poorer clubs, towards two divisions. Surrey, the latest cab on the crowded rank at the top of the championship, will continue to play Sussex next year if the proposed three-conference system is ratified by the First Class Forum a fortnight today, but those who favour a two-division format instead would say that both the AXA and Britannic matches between the two counties last week strengthen their case: Surrey really did seem to be in a different league.

To some extent, Surrey have bought their success but they have invested wisely, not least in their coach, David Gilbert, who is expecting to sign a new contract imminently. Surrey play Gloucestershire in the Aon Trophy final at Bristol today, the climax of a one-day competition for county second XIs presumably designed for developing young professionals. Yet their man of the match in the semi-final was Darren Bicknell, 30, who cannot find a place in a first team dripping with star players.

Sussex may be a contrast, but they are not so down and out as their first-team results suggest. They came close to beating Surrey to a semi-final place in the Aon Trophy, have held their own in the second XI championship, provided the winner of the Abbot Ale national club championship, Eastbourne from the Sussex League, and lost the final of the under-19 tournament last week only because, despite scoring more than Leicestershire, they could not take the last two wickets under the rules of the new two-day, single innings format. Their 18-year-old batsman, George Campbell, scored 180 not out in the semi-final.

All of which suggests that when the counties meet today they should be wary of any system which stokes up a transfer market and defeats the purpose of developing young players. The likes of Sussex and Hampshire would dearly like to be able to buy Chris Adams, of Derbyshire, and Jason Gallian, of Lancashire, when their present counties release them at the end of this season: but Adams is believed to be on his way to Kent and Gallian to Middlesex.