By any standards, the Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool and Arsenal of cricket are having a terrible time. Silverware has been pocketed this season by Essex, Middlesex and Sussex and over the next fortnight the County Championship will be decided, destination: Somerset, Durham, Nottinghamshire or Kent. The “big four” - Yorkshire, Lancashire, Surrey and Warwickshire - will be watching on while counties with considerably smaller resources and population bases scrap for the most prestigious prize in domestic cricket. It would not happen in football.

On one level, the uncertainty over the destination of the championship is to be celebrated. Since its inception in 1992, football's Premier League has become a cosy private party for three clubs, Blackburn Rovers the solitary pooper in 1994-95. I'll get off Mr Samuel's patch quickly before he sends me a 1,500-word eff-off in his column on Wednesday, but in the same time-frame that United, Chelsea and Arsenal have dominated the league, the County Championship has been won by nine counties. This year it may be won by Somerset, who have not won it before. What chance of Hull City doing the same, Martin?

Last year Neil Davidson, the bright and energetic chairman of Leicestershire, produced a paper highlighting what he saw as the growing inequality in English cricket and suggesting that the game was heading down the football route, where the only determining factor to success would be the health of a club's balance sheet.

Dividing the 18 counties into high-income and low-income groups (the disparity between Surrey, with the highest revenue, and Derbyshire, the lowest, was £7.7 million in 2006), he pointed out that no low-income county had won the championship in the previous ten years and that this inequality was beginning to affect the balance of power in one-day cricket as well. He argued that many of the recent changes - the move to two divisions, to central contracts and the introduction of performance-related fee payments for England-qualified players - mitigated against the low-income counties (Essex, Middlesex, Gloucestershire, Somerset, Worcestershire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Glamorgan and Derbyshire).

If you believe that, as far as is possible, sport should be about fairness not finance, that uncertainty is healthy and that the underdogs should have their day, the success this year of two low-income clubs in lifting two of the three one-day trophies on offer should be celebrated (Essex also won the NatWest Pro40 second division title). On that same basis, we should cheer on the Cider Drinkers to their first championship. Davidson would argue that one season's results do not disprove a trend and that Somerset, with their influx of players who are not England-qualified, their wide catchment area and neighbours who are also financially weak and therefore less likely to poach their best players, are better placed to succeed than other low-income counties.

The other way to look at this apparent glitch in Davidson's argument is to look at the shambolic state of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Surrey and Warwickshire, all of whom are failing to exploit their power and the weakness of others. These are the counties with the most financial muscle, the greatest traditions and the biggest pools of talent to draw from, yet they are failing to deliver silverware and locally produced players in sufficient numbers, surely the twin aims of any self-respecting county.

Surrey are a basket case. They are bottom of the championship and without a solitary win; they came fifth in the second division of the Pro40; they finished bottom of their Twenty20 division and next to bottom of their division in the Friends Provident Trophy. This summer they have resembled a bunch of unmanageable, troublesome egos rather than a team. One more runaway ego was added to the mix last week, when Shoaib Akhtar was flown in to try to give the club a last-minute reprieve from relegation.

And while no county did more than Surrey in the 1990s to produce England players, that conveyor belt has stopped. Not one Surrey player has represented England this year; not one Surrey player was named in either England Lions team who played the South Africans and it is five years since a Surrey player won his first England cap. It is five years since Surrey's trophy cabinet needed opening, too; five years, then, of failure on both fronts.

Lancashire's winning drought is, astonishingly, twice the length of Surrey's, 1999 being the most recent time anything other than a second division pennant fluttered over the pavilion. This week they were relegated from the top flight in the Pro40 and they are fighting relegation in the championship. In mitigation, they have continued to produce England players - the absence of three such is hurting their chances now. A county who won a one-day double a shade more than a decade ago with ten locally produced players (the eleventh was Jason Gallian) and without an overseas player in the starting XI are curiously reluctant to show faith in their own and, like Surrey, have often resorted to short-term fixes from overseas.

Warwickshire's fortunes have improved since the departure of Mark Greatbatch and the appointment of Ashley Giles last year. They may yet finish with a trophy, although winning the second division of the County Championship is not necessarily something about which a club such as Warwickshire should be crowing. Giles has stated his opposition to players who are not England-qualified and this “look at us aren't we setting a good example” line is often trotted out.

But how many of Warwickshire's players are locally produced? Tim Ambrose, Ant Botha, Neil Carter, Tim Groenewald, Darren Maddy, Ian Salisbury, Jonathan Trott, Rikki Clarke, Boyd Rankin; not many Black Country accents among that lot.

If Warwickshire do get promoted, they may pass Yorkshire on the way up, scrapping as the Tykes are with Lancashire to avoid the drop. At least Yorkshire will no longer be in the second division of the Pro40 next year and they did reach the semi-finals of the Friends Provident Trophy. But this will be another empty year, the sixth consecutive season without silverware. At least Yorkshire have invested more faith in young England-qualified cricketers this year than many others and, with a business plan in place and a committee shorn of its previously destructive powers, they look reasonably placed to stage a revival.

The old saying is that when Yorkshire are strong, England are strong, the converse being also true. But England's late-season revival under Kevin Pietersen came at a time when the powerhouses of the English county game had been reduced to feebleness.

No one wants to see the big four enjoying a football-like stranglehold on the domestic tournaments, but it must be in English cricket's best interests for these great clubs to make better use of their resources, financial and playing. Otherwise, any success for the national team will be based on flimsy foundations.

Finally the dirt is out on me and that ball

Memorabilia has always left me cold. Caps and sweaters from a 15-year career have been kept, but I could not tell you where they are. The whole Baggy Green phenomenon in Australia has always struck me as strange, as if artefacts could mean more to players than memories or feelings. The rush to keep match balls, signed bats and other knick-knacks passed me by.

If I had been more financially savvy, I might have thought about keeping the ball from the Lord's Test in 1994. Had I done so, a match that cost me about £3,000 in fines might, in time, have turned a tidy profit. Instead, Peter Burge, the match referee, pocketed it and when he died some years ago, Nigel Wray, an entrepreneur who owns one of the finest collections of sporting memorabilia, bought it from Burge's estate for £25,000.

Wray has always been keen to open his collection to the public and it is perhaps a sign of these calamitous times that even he has balked at the prospect of financing a museum. Ingeniously, he has come up with a solution: the first (to my knowledge) virtual museum for sporting memorabilia. Stanley Matthews's 1953 FA Cup kit; Bobby Moore's last England shirt; L.S. Lowry's Going to the Match, Douglas Jardine's Harlequin cap; the ball with which Fred Trueman took his 300th Test wicket; and many other delights, all just a free click away. The beauty of it is that technology allows the viewer to zoom in so that these pieces can be seen in microscopic detail. It is still the question I get asked the most, I suppose: just what were you doing to that ball? Now you can see for yourself at priorycollection.com. Looks incriminating to me.