` SIR, now the humiliation of our Test team is complete, we must act immediately to change the system which is threatening the very existence of our national summer sport. Wretched match and series results are now a new phenomenon. Household names like Boycott, Botham, Gooch, Gower and dare I say, Willis have all been involved in shocking defeats in the last 20 years.

One has to go back nearly 40 years to get to the root of the problem. When the country cricket system became full-time professional in the early 1960s, cricket mediocrity in this country was conceived.

What is it for? In every other Test-playing country first-class cricket exists for one purpose only: to produce the strongest possible national side. That is not why the first-class game is played here.

It exists in the UK solely to entertain 140,000 county and MCC members, only a small percentage of whom ever go to watch their team. These county members run our national summer sport, and aren't they making a mess of it.

Have you ever stopped to think what this so-called professional system costs? Wage bills vary from about £700,000 to £1.2m per country. A cumulative total of around £16-17m is spent on the 400-odd players, half of whom only fulfil 2nd XI fixtures which attract virtually no spectators at all. It is a complete waste of money and has to be stopped.

Just imagine how those millions could be spent developing the sport nationwide. But, even more poignantly, ask yourself how many fine cricketers are not available to the first-class game because they do not wish to be full-time professionals. In every other country butchers, bakers and candlestick makers can all play first-class cricket: doctors, solicitors, accountants, company managing directors and rocket scientists too!

We produce successful age-group teams, but when this talent enters the closed shop of the county circuit, their flair and enjoyment of the game is quickly extinguished by a `comfort zone' mentality.

Many talented youngsters simply have much better things to do with their life. Those that join the ranks of this clapped-our army wait in the queue behind battle-worn benefit-seekers who stay in the game, if they are batsmen, until they are 40.

The by-now-bored younger fry settle for their new sponsored cars and decent wage-packets and quickly kowtow to the system which hatches Gameboy and personal-stereo addicts and mollycoddles the boring and uncommunicative.

So what's to be done? When the England & Wales Cricket Board was formed the county cricket associations, or boards, should have been given the power and money to develop and run our game. The clubs have an ongoing conflict of interest with international cricket. Why should they get all the revenue from the sponsorship and televising of the sport?

The First Class Forum should be disbanded and the government should take a lead in appointing an interim board of directors to oversee a change from self-interested and parochial county-led administration to an alternative where the England team is the priority and every cricketer in the country has the opportunity to climb the ladder into the national side.

 Australia are the best team in the world at both forms of the game, so why can't we mirror their system? Simply split our current 18 teams into three divisions of six and play ten first-class matches a season. Fiercely competitive premier leagues around the country would provide the players for the counties and young professional men could use their annual holiday to play first-class cricket.

They should be well paid for doing so and soon the system would produce the standard of cricketer, and more importantly man, who would then be contracted for a lucrative place in England's elite national squad of about 24 full-time professional cricketers – not 400!

Many county professionals could continue to earn a living from cricket by becoming qualified coaches in their area and still being able to pick up appearance fees and bonuses for playing in first-class fixtures.

The England side have become an introverted group who are obsessed with money, a characteristic which is bred by the insecurity of the county circuit. They do enough to get picked for the next match or tour, as county players do to ensure their next contract. But these are not the individuals to blame.

Members of the First Class Forum are the guilty parties who have hired and fired a succession of captains and coaches who deflect the spotlight from them and take all the flak in the newspapers and electronic media. Perhaps Kate Hoey, who has first-hand experience of county committee life, could galvanise this project and he remembered as the sports minister who saved cricket.

The messy alternative to this plan will be the inevitable breakaway of the counties who have Test match grounds. They will form their own super league, and after a World-Series-Cricket-style impasse, these five counties, plus perhaps MCC, will dominate and eventually administer the sport in this country largely for their own ends.'

Solution 2 Abolish the county pro

 Nasser Hussain summed this up in an interview the day after the Oval Test when he said of Andrew Flintoff: `The more he plays just in county cricket the more he will get dragged down into it.' The challenge for a young and talented cricketer is to make big scores and graduate to Test level, but the mediocrity of county cricket drags players down to its barely first-class standard.

County cricket is an infectious disease, which quickly takes its debilitating grip on any young player who strays into its contaminated zone. Its mediocrity is not a symptom, but the cause of all the problems in English cricket. The 18 countries have ultimate control of every major aspect of English cricket, and as they will never contemplate culling themselves to either or fewer, the only chance that English cricket has is for the top current players, and more importantly the top young players, to be divorced from county cricket.

What we need: the Aussle Academy, featuring Dennis Lillee

To provide for a successful future, English cricket should mirror the simple structure of other successful countries. Ideally there should be just five first-class teams, each playing eight four-day games a year, plus a couple of one-day competitions. The players making up these five teams would be allocated, probably on a regional basis, from 55 professional cricketers all contracted to the controlling body. Fifteen of these players would make up the senior squad, and the other 40 would be young professionals at an English Cricket Academy which would take in ten young players each year for a four-year course. The only domestic first-class cricket would be the five-team championship. Any cricket played by the professional players outside of the five-team and international formats would be in the amateur game, and then only by order of the Academy or senior squad coaches.

So how can this divorce from county cricket be achieved? Ideally the counties would give up claiming the subsidies which provide a crutch to allow their hopeless businesses to struggle on. This would instantly produce a natural cull of their numbers. But it is fair to assume that they would never vote for such draconian measures against themselves, which leaves no easy answer. The key is for ICC to accept that the international game would benefit if England could raise its standard, a view that most countries would support, and that it would recognise an English Test team under a new structure, as long as it was run by a new and properly constituted board of control, and the majority of the top players were contracted to it. If this could somehow happen, the new board of control would find itself well financed by television rights and other profits of the international game.

The money would be used to employ the 55 players as well as to finance the development of youth cricket right through to the Academy. The millions of pounds currently used in subsidies to prop up the otherwise insolvent counties would all be channelled into a strong, productive new structure rather than wasted on mediocrity. County cricket would be history, and England would have a real chance of competing with the best in the next century.

If only. More likely, county cricket will survive to clamp England at the bottom of the rankings for years to come. There is a narrow tunnel out of here. But is anyone prepared to grasp the nettle and lead the way?

Solution 3 Merge the counties

  THERE ARE three things we're all agreed upon. 1)
• The English team is not good enough.
 2)
• There are too many county games and not enough possible interested in them.
 3)
• The standard of professional county players is not high enough. Some of the overseas players who would walk into the England team are not good enough to play for Australia, which has a population of 18m – a third of ours.

My solution is to reduce the number of professional teams to ten, merging eight adjacent pairs such as Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. The logic is simple: ten teams, nine games a season, up to twice as many people going to each match, which would mean twice the income. Admittedly, diehard members might be put off, but they should be cancelled out by new fans attracted by the higher standard of cricket.

To encourage the merged counties to reduce their overheads quickly, you could offer them two old-style ECB handouts for the first year, then one and a half for the next three years, and then bring the subsidy back down to the (very high) level it is now. Thus the counties would know that they would make a profit if they could streamline their operations in a hurry.

Once the system has been set up, it should become a virtuous circle. Clubs will make more money, so they can spend more on players, and there will only be half the number of professional cricketers, so competition will be greater. This will increase the quality of the professional player, which means a better England team, which means greater TV revenue, and so on.

Half the professional in the game – from groundstaff to administrators – would lose their jobs, but this would be better than all of them over a longer period of time.

Obviously if you asked say, Sussex and Hampshire to merge, there would be many disgruntled people, but not nearly as many as there will be when the county game disappears into oblivion – which it will over the next 20 years if it does nothing to revitalise itself.

© Wisden CricInfo Ltd