Last week was the best of the season. Yesterday’s rain excepted and outside Blackpool, that is. There, all was sogginess where there should and would have been a big holiday crowd and, no doubt, one of those vibrant games of cricket that are guaranteed when counties venture from their headquarters to a club ground. Much sympathy for Lancashire and Surrey, but England (both men and women) are in the ascendant, the county game is being played and watched with continued zeal - despite all the sporting alternatives and the media’s misguidedly lukewarm shoulder - and on every ground I go to there are keen youngsters with bats and balls.

It is almost a year now since the inaugural World Twenty20 tournament in South Africa that threw the cricket world off its axis as a result of Yuvraj Singh’s six sixes in an over off Stuart Broad and India’s subsequent defeat of Pakistan in the final. But truly there is nothing new under the sun. The 40th anniversary of Sir Garfield Sobers’s famous original feat is a reminder of that.

The sale at auction of the bat with which he hit his six sixes off Malcolm Nash, for £54,000 in 2000, and of what Nash believes was the wrong ball, for £26,400 two years ago, merely underline the endless fascination of the game. So do Alan Hill’s affectionate new biography of Tony Lock and, already, a desk diary for 2009 with all the Australian tour fixtures and wonderfully evocative oil paintings by the Cornwall-bred artist Christina Pierce, who remains hooked on the game partly via her 11-year-old son, Oscar.

He plays for Surrey Under-11s, who are no doubt doing rather better than the seniors, hapless failures this season and living proof that money cannot always buy success. Surrey will make a bigger profit than anyone again this year, but will win nothing. They showed dubious priorities when their chairman’s potentially exciting joint proposal for a nine-county Twenty20 competition with MCC’s chief executive failed to grasp the fact that just because 18 teams are too many for a short, sharp English version of the Indian Premier League, they still had to include the grounds and members of the other nine clubs.

Administrators are easy to criticise and they all have sheets to balance, but they need to feel the true pulse of the game. Watching groups of boys playing cricket on the outfield in Basingstoke during Hampshire’s extraordinary match against Durham this past week, Glenn Delve, the Hampshire managing director, bemoaned the fact that at the Rose Bowl he has to keep spectators off the outfield during intervals “to comply with ICC regulations for international grounds”. Security, health and safety are the banes of modern sport.

There was none of that nonsense at May’s Bounty. Although the Basingstoke pitch seamed too much for a fair balance for the first day and a half, partly a product of the weather, a ground that has been staging county cricket since 1906 is unlikely to wait a further eight years for a fixture because it produced a classically seesawing match with a sting in its tail. Sean Ervine, the promising Liam Dawson, 18, and a simple redistribution of luck caused a result with far-reaching consequences.

That combination represented something of a microcosm of the county game as it is: Ervine a Zimbabwean who has flirted with Western Australia, but settled in and for England, Dawson a promising home-grown product playing on his home ground. Geoff Miller, the national selector, is only one man concerned that there are still too many of the former and too few of the latter. That is especially true of the group of relatively seasoned county cricketers between the established England “development squad” and the very young ones such as Dawson who have played for England Under-19 and are on the golden runway that leads from Loughborough.

Samit Patel, of Nottinghamshire, has been on an inside track since his under-19 days and rightly so. He has talent, a good temperament and the necessary experience, too. The selectors still tend to be too much in a hurry to pick on potential and, in the case of fast bowlers, too concerned about speed as opposed to control and know-how. James Foster, of Essex, is one who was picked too young, but will surely get a second chance for England this winter. Another who positively demands serious consideration is Mark Davies, of Durham, who has produced two of the three best analyses of the season, at Basingstoke and Old Trafford.

“It bugs me when people say I only take wickets in seamer-friendly conditions,” Davies said with understandable feeling after his eight for 24 on Thursday.

The no less consistent James Tomlinson - a budding Ryan Sidebottom if he can master the inswinger - took his season’s haul to 59 for Hampshire in the same match, but Davies’s 220 career wickets have been taken at only 20 runs each. At 27, he is strong enough for hard work and he deals in five-wicket analyses with far greater regularity than rivals who have caught the eyes of selectors because they are quicker. Speed and hostility are different, as Glenn McGrath proved.

Whether Davies would prosper on true Test pitches is questionable, but he hits the seam, swings it away and does not offer easy runs.