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Public perceptions of the health of cricket usually revolve round the weather and the performances of the national team. Sunshine at the start and finish of the memorably intriguing LV County Championship cannot fully erase memories of the expensive flood in Worcester and uneven performances by England, but the prevailing mood of September is optimistic.

One day at the Rose Bowl this month, the giant lens of Graham Morris, the photographer, caught a spider spinning a web between the middle and off stumps while Kent were trying to bowl out Hampshire. There were times early in the long, disjointed, weather-dominated 2007 season when it looked as though spiders could spin away without fear of interruption whenever England’s fast bowlers were operating from the other end.

Three victories over a sadly disorganised West Indies team were flattering but, a few months later, three of England’s failures in Australia last winter seem to have learnt the necessary lessons. James Anderson has rediscovered his natural skill, Sajid Mahmood and Liam Plunkett have improved after practising their art in the hard but more forgiving school of county cricket. With Harmison, Hoggard, Sidebottom, Tremlett, Broad and Panesar in the mix, England can choose from a pool of bowlers whose ability should make them competitive in all forms of cricket. Of course, they would be much more so with Andrew Flintoff, but a prolonged rest seems to offer the only chance of his return to Test cricket.

There is a further caveat. The improvement in the bowlers seemed to start from the moment that Allan Donald joined Peter Moores and Andy Flower on the coaching staff. Donald will be missed as a mentor, however quickly Ottis Gibson, one of the heroes of the county season, settles to the same role in Sri Lanka.

The credit from an extremely competitive and all too short Test series with India was shared between the rebuilt England team and their more experienced conquerors. In the one-day matches that followed, Paul Collingwood’s leadership and livewire fielding were the basis of a belated success that will have to be repeated in much tougher conditions, and against even stronger opponents in Sri Lanka in the next few weeks, if it is to convince. The Twenty20 venture foundered even before the new captain blotted his copybook, but the more successful sides showed that, although adventurous batting and subtle bowling are essentials, true quality and sound techniques are rewarded, too.

Because administrators cannot resist the meretricious, there is going to be much more Twenty20. The ECB released further changes to next season’s itinerary in the middle of an England match ten days ago, always a sign that the spin-doctors do not really want anyone to notice. Why? Because it has funked doing anything about the commercially-profitable NatWest Pro40 and it feels guilty for agreeing to another expansion of the players’ workload.

The Twenty20, its commercial status enhanced by the ECB’s agreement to send the finalists to India in October to play against their Indian, Australian and South African counterparts for a £2.5 million total purse that dwarfs anything available from all other domestic cricket, will be expanded to five home and five away games played in three regionally based groups of six counties. In the Friends Provident Trophy, each team will play home and away in four groups of five teams, including Ireland and Scotland. That means one first-round game fewer for each county, but the top two teams from each group will qualify for a new quarter-final stage, the winners of each group playing at home. The sum of it all will be more cricket for spectators, more profit for counties, but more demands on by far the hardest-worked professionals in the world.

It has taken Hugh Morris, soon to be confirmed as the managing director of England cricket, a long time to produce proposals for a revised format from 2009. He and his review group have canvassed widely. “Floating” cricket followers frequently say they do not understand the present system and no one should blame them for that, because there is no system. Why can they not start all championship matches on the same day of the week, they demand; and why do the county and international programmes not dovetail better? Because priorities are wrong.

One of the questions being asked by a market research team seeking expert views was whether a reduction to 12 counties would solve the chronic problem of an unbalanced, overloaded programme, but I cannot see them taking the tough decisions that would threaten the future of some of the 18 counties. Nor should they. So long as all of them are forced to spend a greater amount of their centrally-provided income on developing local youth and less on wages – a salary cap for each county’s playing staff is essential – there is no need for any to be forced out of business.

Such has been the toing and froing of overseas mercenaries this season that loyalty and team spirit have become devalued. Did Inzamam-ul-Haq really become a Yorkshireman overnight, or Murali Kartik a Londoner? One of the Bothas, Ant by name, was a Derbyshire player one day, a Warwickshire man the next.

Meanwhile, the invasion by those with European or Kolpak passports steadily reduces options for the home-bred cricketers. I begin to think a transfer system, with checks and balances, would be fairer to counties with smaller resources. Why, for instance, should Leicestershire get nothing for nurturing Stuart Broad now that he has sought higher pay at Nottinghamshire?

As always, there was much good to report, too, not least healthy participation among the young and good-sized crowds both for Tests and internationals and much of the county cricket. The wizard of Sahiwal, Mushtaq Ahmed, and Gibson, respectively 37 and 38, were the season’s outstanding bowlers, Mark Ramprakash once again the best batsman in the country, Kevin Pietersen included. It no longer makes any sense to leave the peerless Ramprakash out of the Test team.

He and Mushtaq, the leading bowler in the county championship for the fifth year in succession, were not the only veterans to excel. Shivnarine Chanderpaul was a hero in defeat for West Indies, Andrew Caddick the bowling pillar of a Somerset side that could not stop winning. Durham shaded them as team of the year, for all Yorkshire’s revival under another veteran, Darren Gough, Lancashire’s heroic near-miss and Sussex’s hard-earned third championship title in five years.

It figures

38 The age of the leading batsman in first-class cricket (Mark Ramprakash) as well as the second and third-best bowlers (Ottis Gibson and Andrew Caddick). Mushtaq Ahmed, the leading wicket-taker, is 37

25 Extra runs that Lancashire needed in their final match to win the championship

496 The runs, for four wickets, that Surrey made in a one-day game against Gloucestershire in April

73 First-class dismissals by Phil Mustard, of Durham,

22 more than the next-best wicketkeeper 8 Fifty partnerships in India’s first innings against England at the Brit Oval, beating the old Test record of six

22 Players used by India and England in three Test matches, the first time that both sides have been unchanged throughout a series