THIS column comes to you for the first time from the cosy confines of the Press cabin at Durham County Cricket Club.

A regular in the rather plusher Press box at Lord's used to say the world's three greatest lies were: "Yes, darling of course I love you," "the cheque's in the post" and "I'm from the TCCB, I'm here to help you."

For the Test and County Cricket Board we can, of course, now substitute the England and Wales Cricket Board, or ECB for short.

I belong to that strange breed who experience a gladdening of the heart at the first resonant crack of leather on willow, yet the blood has not exactly coursed through the veins this week. It began with the news that we in the Durham Press corps will not have our usual walkie-talkie link with the scorers because the ECB have forbidden it.

In this commercial age everything has to have a price, including simple information, it seems.

Durham are doing their best to get round the problem, so hopefully we can maintain normal service without boosting the coffers of the ECB, one of those vastly over-staffed organisations where people justify their existence by making life difficult for others.

THE sight of every Durham fielder wearing woolly hats on Wednesday merely added to the impression that this has been a bizarre start to the season, highlighted by reports of frogs breeding in the outfield at Trent Bridge.

England are splendidly resurgent and on the international front a summer of great expectations lies ahead, but strange things are happening in the county game and village cricket will be a desperately sad victim of foot-and-mouth.

It struck me that 11 intelligent Durham University students might have better things to do than spend one and a half days providing cannon fodder for the Durham batsmen at a bitterly cold Riverside ground.

They can all now claim that they have played first-class cricket, but most of them were passengers in a supposedly first-class compartment of the ECB's rickety train.

Another of the six University Centres of Cricketing Excellence, Bradford/Leeds, included a current member of the Durham Academy in Bishop Auckland's Hiran Marambe and a former one in Simon Birtwisle, who top scored with 64 out of 180 against Derbyshire.

Admittedly, a tiny minority of professional sportsmen are late developers, but if Birtwisle looked unlikely to make the grade after three years in the Durham Academy there is little reason to believe that three more years in a UCCE will turn him into a potential England player.

Still, at least this is an attempt to further the development of young players and compares very favourably with what some of the counties appear to be doing.

Several of Durham's division two rivals have been trawling South Africa for players with English qualifications. Nottinghamshire have signed two, Warwickshire and Derbyshire one each, while top-flight Leicestershire have ditched any pretence of a youth policy by signing 37-year-old Devon Malcolm.

Meanwhile, the polarisation of talent is gaining force as a result of two divisions, as underlined by Mark Ramprakash's move from Middlesex to Surrey. With Ed Giddins also recruited, the Surrey showboats look incredibly strong, while their illustrious neighbours look sadly impoverished. I wonder how the ECB mandarins at Lord's feel about that.

MY crystal ball gave me the wrong man when I prematurely wrote George Best's obituary two weeks ago. It is Jim Baxter who has gone in search of the taverns in the sky.

The brilliant Scot survived to 61 because his second liver transplant in 1994 was a success, but his football career had ended shortly after his 30th birthday.

"The bevvy did my liver in and the gambling did my brain in," was his candid admission of how his glorious talent declined, although he added: "I went downhill because I left Rangers and went to a bad side."

He was referring to his 1965 move to Sunderland, but he was still at Roker Park two years later when he produced the performance for which he is perhaps best remembered in Scotland's 3-2 win against England's World Cup winners at Wembley.

Sunderland might not have seen the best of Baxter during his three years there, but there will be fans who remember him as one of the most gifted players they ever had.

FOR one of England's two decent tennis players to lose his coach is forgivable, for them both to do so looks like carelessness, which in Greg Rusedski's case it almost certainly is.

Hopefully Tim Henman will continue to prosper without David Felgate, but there shouldn't be too many tears for Rusedski if he slips back into reverse after his spat with Pat Cash.

Having beaten the world's top players since Cash put together his impressive back-up team, the previously grinning Greg might find he has rather less to smile about