Here we go again - the summer of 2012 has crept up and the County Championship season has arrived.

We get going against Leicestershire at Grace Road this morning and I will be performing my new role as elite performance analyst and assistant coach.

There is a great buzz around the team and pre-season training has gone extremely well thanks to the presence of head coach Matthew Mott, who has spent most of the winter in Cardiff structuring our training in preparation for the season.

Matthew became doubly popular with the lads when he informed the team that part of our pre-season training would be spent in La Manga in Spain.

The time was spent working on fielding and fitness on football fields that resembled bowling greens. The facilities were superb and gave us great practice heading into the new season and the golf was pretty good too!

So a new season starts and so does a new captain. My close mate Mark Wallace has made a great start to the season both on and off the field.

He has made it quite clear that playing for Glamorgan is a huge honor and something we should all be proud of.

Mark has scored two hundreds in our warm-up games that have been ideal preparation.

A mixture of two-day games at Kent and Somerset and also two one-day games at Kent and Bristol have made up our pre-season practice.

Nearly all of these games have been played in temperatures above 20 degrees… though the conditions in Leicester are set to be a bit different.

It’s been a strange pre-season because we have only practised once as a team in Cardiff due to our fixture list.

However, I believe this is the best prepared group of players I have seen in my 15 years at Glamorgan.

The way the lads have trained throughout the winter coupled with their performances during the pre-season fixtures puts us in a great position to start positively and on the front foot.

All the bowlers have got overs under their belts and all the batsmen have spent valuable time in the middle with five hundreds being scored during that time.

I’m sure you will have noticed a couple of new faces that will be joining us for the 2012 campaign.

Moises Henriques has already joined us from New South Wales as the replacement for overseas star Marcus North, who misses the first six weeks of the season because of a finger injury.

I had the pleasure of picking up Moises from Heathrow on Friday and was immediately struck by his size - he is a big boy! He played a part in the friendly at Oxford University and bowled with real pace. I am sure he will surprise a few blurry-eyed batsmen in the early weeks of the season.