With any luck it will end with the ECB turning the County Championship into a tournament of such stature that the IPL pales into insignificance.

I've been calling for unlimited overseas players for years, and for club competition to eclipse national competition in terms of both status and drawing in the money: and the IPL has shown just how commercially viable this would be, and I very much hope that the outcome, within 3 years, is a domestic game so strong that Test cricket against a team like the WI would be a major step down.

The ECB is uniquely well placed to manage this: the scale of competition is already in place, complete with large, well run, clubs with distinct local identities and the capacity to handle pretty much anything thrown at them.

What SHOULD follow is international club competition: the best domestic sides from England playing rivals from the IPL and elsewhere. I'm quite sure it will happen within the next few years... hopfully replacing the Champions Trophy in the ICC calendar.

Oh my goodness Rachael, don't you need money to do that? Where's the MONEY coming from?

The reason the IPL and ICL came about was because of a squabble over media rights, with Zee TV (I think it was Zee) basically saying okay, if we can't WIN the media rights to broadcast Cricket Matches then we'll create our own and that's exactly what they did.

This is the equivalent of producing websites with content specifically designed to attract visitors to them so you can sell advertising space to them. This says nothing at all about the quality of content and everything about selling advertising.

It's not about the level of cricket being played it's all about MONEY, MONEY and MONEY!

Ask yourself a couple of questions - what's the general 'audience market share' of a typical T20 or One day game in our County system? A couple of million at most, compare that to the Billion potential population in India where Cricket is by far the number one sport.

So, who's going to be bidding huge sums of money to televise our county games? No-one that's the answer.

Oh my god, you have no idea whatsoever of the implications of that. Our national sides will simply slide down the toilet if that was ever allowed to happen.

That's a bit like saying to our Premiership Football Clubs, you can have as many overseas players as you like - there's hardly any English players in the Premiership as it is !

Please, the ECB couldn't organise a **** up in a brewery between them.

Depends on who's playing: why shouldn't the audience be global if Somerset played Hampshire and the sides read something like this:

Somerset:

Marcus Trescothick
Neil Edwards
Justin Langer
James Hildreth
Cameron White
Peter Trego
Craig Kieswetter+
Andy Caddick
Danish Kaneria
Ishant Sharma
Shanthakumaran Sreesanth


Hampshire:

Michael Carberry
Michael Brown
Mahela Jayawardena
Sachin Tendulkar
Kevin Pietersen
VVC Laxman
Nic Pothas+
Shane Warne
Chris Tremlett
Stuart Clark
Shane Bond

Can you imagine the potential audience for a Surrey side that boasted Virendar Sehwag, Dhoni, Brett Lee, Harbhajan Singh, Saqlain Mustaq and Mohammed Asif?

Asian audiences are available no matter where the game is played. Don't believe me? Just take a look at where most Manchester United fans hail from...So what? Even with the current set-up sees far too many pretty ordinary (but England qualified) players getting regular starts.

I'd take a leaf out of the IPL handbook: insist on a proportion of young, England qualified players in every side - two youngsters per side would do.