It has already been a good week for Dougie Brown, a proud Scot who made nine one-day international appearances for England and was willing the Better Together campaign to succeed from his Warwickshire base. “That’s the sensible way to go,” said the 44-year-old, who was born in Stirling and educated in Alloa before moving south as a teenager, and ended his representative career with Scotland in 2007 at the first Twenty20 World Cup.

In fact it has already been an excellent month, as Brown’s Bears won their first Twenty20 title on home soil at Edgbaston four Saturdays ago, have climbed steadily to second in the County Championship table and are gunning for a rare one-day double when they face Durham in the final of the Royal London Cup at Lord’s.

But there has been another, more personal, reason for the feelgood factor that Warwickshire and their director of cricket take into the traditional end-of-season showpiece, happily now restored to a day-long 50-over match after four years in the 40-overs halfway house.

Brown, who was under some pressure anyway at the start of his second season since succeeding Ashley Giles at Edgbaston, was left in an invidious position as Warwickshire accommodated Jonathan Trott’s wishes to come straight back to first-class cricket, four months after his abrupt departure from England’s Ashes tour.

After struggling in two pre-season fixtures and a single Championship match, Trott agreed with Warwickshire and the England and Wales Cricket Board that he had not been ready. Those who feared he would never be the same batsman again seemed to have been vindicated. A few days before his 33rd birthday, it was impossible not to wonder whether his cricket career, with Warwickshire as well as England, was over.

So it is hard to imagine there have been many more cheering individual stories in the 51-year history of Lord’s finals than Trott’s appearance for the Bears, restored as a pivotal, reliable figure in his favourite No3 position. He is surely guaranteed a warm reception at the ground where he scored two of his nine Test centuries.

Until this weekend, his second comeback has been a much lower-profile affair. After a couple of weeks away from the game he was back in the dressing room for a championship win at Trent Bridge in May but waited until June before returning in a handful of second-team games, and then a couple of T20 appearances.

There was nothing spectacular about his first-class return, as he scored 23 and 19 against Nottinghamshire at Edgbaston, but Brown was already encouraged. “The thing that makes Trotty so special, as everyone knows, is that he is very driven by scoring runs – and that’s the thing that he maybe lost a little bit when he was struggling at the start of the summer. You see him now and those core aspects are back.

“I do think that it is very important to recognise that there’s been a lot of really good work done by the ECB and their support team, as well as ours at Warwickshire. But obviously in the end Trotty deserves the credit. The great thing is he’s always been really open about everything, so we’ve never had to talk around the subject. He’s such a great character to have in the dressing room. Everybody is delighted for him.”

Since that championship return against Notts, Trott has scored two centuries in five further appearances, the last of them 164 off 312 balls against Northamptonshire – admittedly not the strongest bowling attack but reassuring evidence that he has rediscovered those famous powers of concentration.

It has been against the white ball in 50-over cricket, however, that Trott has really excelled, a reminder of how consistently he performed for England in the format, even if that was not always appreciated. His tally of 486 runs in eight innings in the tournament, at an average of more than 60 and a strike rate of 87, is second only to Glamorgan’s Jacques Rudolph, and has included half-centuries in the quarter and semi-final victories over Essex and Kent respectively, as well as two centuries during the group stage.

“He’s very happy, in a very good space, and playing great cricket,” Brown added. Inevitably, that will lead to more speculation about a possible England recall, about which Trott was asked for the first time during a local radio interview this week. He was sensibly noncommittal, saying only: “Maybe – I’m not putting too much pressure on myself.”

“That’s quite right,” echoed Brown, who has lost a very much current England batsman in Ian Bell for Saturday’s contest because of a broken toe. “It will be up to other people in the end, as well as him, in terms of the runs he scores. The important thing for us is that he’s happy, he’s enjoying his cricket and he’s scoring important runs for us in pressurised situations. The rest can take care of itself.”