The climax to the County Championship has been in marked contrast to last year.

The Warwickshire players were having a day off when Middlesex hit the winning runs against us on Monday and so would have seen on Teletext that we had handed them the Lord's Taverners trophy.

In a nice moment of irony it was revealed that Nick Knight, the captain of Warwickshire, was in a contract meeting with the coach and chief executive, discussing the players' futures, when he heard the unexpected news.

It is not the first time Warwickshire have won the Championship, of course. It was less than ten years ago, in fact, when Dermot Reeve lifted the trophy, but it must have been a rather muted celebration this time at Edgbaston, at least compared to what went on at Hove last year.

This should not, however, take anything away from the Warwickshire players who will feel, quite rightly, that they deserve to be called champions. They might not have been as spectacular as we were last year but they have undoubtedly been the most consistent team in the league.

By that I mean that they have played the best cricket for the longest periods of time.

Their game plan has been simple: Score as many runs as possible in the first innings and let the rest of the game take its natural course. This has led to only five wins (compared to our ten last year) but no losses (we lost three last year) and to remain unbeaten over the course of the season is a remarkable effort.

In summing up our achievements last year, I commented that the long list of huge first innings scores we compiled was the reason we won the league. It allowed Mushy to work his magic with 'scoreboard pressure'.

We saw in the recent match against Middlesex how important scoreboard pressure is. Mushtaq bowled very well on a helpful wicket but there was no pressure to score runs at much of a rate against him.

Thus, a skilful player such as Owais Shah, only has to bide his time and pick off the ones and twos. If they had been chasing another 100 runs the story would have been completely different.

A look at the points table proves the importance of a big first innings score. Warwickshire have only four more bowling points than us but 19 more batting points. That is the equivalent to 950 more runs in the first innings alone!

I hope this does not start a trend for counties to display negative tactics by packing their teams with batsmen with a view to securing as many bonus points as possible. If that is the case then perhaps the points system should be reviewed.

It was only in 1997 that points were brought in for a draw and the amount of points for a win reduced from 16 to 14. The result has been a massive increase in drawn games. In 1995, for example, there were 58 draws amongst the 18 counties and 248 games ended in a result. This year, with one or two games to go for each county, the number of drawn games from both divisions stands at 125 - more than double the total of a decade ago.

Will Warwickshire's members care that they have watched their team draw ten times this year, however? I very much doubt it.