County fixtures in March? It's just not cricket At the moment many counties are abroad on pre-season tours. They have always courted controversy. Players swear by them; the bean-counters swear at them. Sponsors are usually sought. Six counties to play in pre-season T20 tournament in West Indies. How is this preparation for English season? And counties say they are skint," tweeted a well-regarded cricket writer last week. And, yes, Derbyshire, Hampshire, Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire and Yorkshire are all currently in Barbados participating in a tournament, along with Barbados and the Combined Campuses and Colleges side. Will it help them? It might. It might not. Facilities are key, both for practice and matches. In that respect, many of the pre-season tours in which I took part were shambolic, with bacchanalia often taking charge. One of the most beneficial, though, in cricketing terms was a trip to Pretoria where the net surfaces at Centurion Park were immaculate and available all day, every day. Not so good was the three-day match against Northern Transvaal. Asked the lame question "Who's the fastest bowler you ever faced?" I always reply: "Allan Donald. Lord's 1998. Frightening. But the true, less glamorous answer is that it was Rudi Bryson in that match at Centurion. Short, stocky and fired up, Bryson bowled me six overs of exclusively very fast short balls. I scored only two runs, fended over short-leg's head. When Bryson was eventually taken from the attack, I breathed a sigh of relief, and was bowled first ball by the medium-paced Pierre de Bruyn. The most productive pre-season? At home. Two weeks of uninterrupted nets in glorious weather on unusually good surfaces at Sophia Gardens in 1997, with a new sphinx-like coach (Fletcher D) standing watching. Glamorgan won the championship that year. The trouble is that you obviously cannot guarantee the weather. As counties have discovered with the pressure to venture abroad and as the England & Wales Cricket Board will discover some time with these early sheer-volume-of-cricket-induced starts. For the past two years it has been lucky. Bill Veeck, the famous baseball promoter, owner and financier, once said: "There are only two seasons - winter and baseball." Replace baseball with cricket, but the trouble is that even they're merging now. Indeed one Glamorgan player humorously commented on Sunday evening on the incongruous sight, as he was packing his kit for Taunton, of a gritting lorry passing his house. Anthony Trollope, the Victorian novelist not averse to writing about cricket, wrote: "Let no man boast that he has got through the perils of winter till at least the seventh of May." There will have been five rounds of County Championship matches by May 7 this year. It will be nothing to boast about.