WORCESTERSHIRE start the week looking forward to the opening, third round of the Cheltenham & Gloucester Trophy and a home tie in more ways than one.

That the professionals should take on the amateurs of the county is ironic and maybe not ideal; the romantics would like to see our amateurs progress at the expense of someone else's professionals.

However, one purpose of the Cricket Boards is to provide opportunities for club players to maximise their achievements. What better way than a New Road showdown with the County's best?

The reward for the winners is a home tie with resurgent Yorkshire which the fixture card has down for New Road.

I wonder what the Board, with a supposed home venue at Kidderminster, make of that!

And what reward for the individual who makes his mark for the Board side?

It has been a long time since Worcestershire youth or club cricket has fed anyone successfully into the County set-up.

The establishment of Cricket Boards around the country has been part of the restructuring of the amateur game aimed at improving the coherence of club cricket.

The best players should be able to rise more easily to the top in a structure which gives them well-matched, competitive cricket.

Certainly, the Birmingham League, the premier league in the region into which other leagues feed, is a fluid, dynamic competition which now has Shrewsbury as its latest recruit.

It remains to be seen, however, whether it can produce cricketers who can match the quality of Australian club cricketers who are able, apparently, to step straight into the county game.

Following the Board are Zimbabwe, starting their tour with a four-day game at New Road. Events of the winter give an added significance to this fixture with the possibility of cameramen descending on the ground in numbers not seen since Ian Botham's heyday.

Sadly, it will not be the cricket so much in which they are interested.

Think of cricket protests and South Africa, the season's main tourists, come to mind.

How ironic that Zimbabwe, whose domestic cricket is a model of fairness and integration, might attract political protest at a time when South Africa visit as a grown up Test playing nation and yet one still with an issue over quota systems for its players.

Zimbabwe have just one batsman, Grant Flower with a Test batting average the right side of 30 and one bowler, Heath Streak, with a bowling average the right, but opposite side of the same mark.

It is to be hoped though that this young side can excite with the energy and commitment which all Zimbabwean sides bring to their cricket; it is certainly a part of the cricketing world for which Worcester will, with good reason, always have a great fondness.