The England and Wales Cricket Board have announced a Twenty20 competition to begin in 2020 – their attempt at getting more people interested in cricket.

It has caused controversy, with some saying it will be the beginning of the end for county cricket and others saying it will keep the game alive in the UK.

While the domestic game currently has 18 major counties, the proposed tournament will contain eight teams with squads of 15 players each. The teams will most likely take on the names of the cities they are based in, doing away with Surrey and Yorkshire and perhaps introducing London and Leeds.

This eight team, city-based structure mirrors the hugely successful Big Bash in Australia and the Indian Premier League.

The plan is for 36 matches to be played over 38 days in the school summer holidays, and for 8 of those matches to be live on free-to-air TV.

The timing of the tournament could help to attract the best players in the world to it, as only England play regular international cricket at that time of year. Squads may miss England players but will be allowed 3 overseas stars.

Here are a few thoughts I have about this proposal.

County cricket is dying anyway

The County Championship, the oldest and purest cricket championship, has been attended by almost nobody for decades. Counties have a few die-hard members, and some of them will get a few spectators in at the height of the holiday season, but other than that matches are played in front of empty grounds, rendering the four-day competition next to pointless. The Twenty20 tournament is not threatening to end the Championship, but might make enough money to keep it alive. Each county has been promised £1.3 million as part of the proposal.

Will enough matches be on free-to-air TV?

English cricket has not been live on free-to-air TV since 2005. Since the ECB made the game available only to people who could afford a Sky Sports subscription the number of schoolchildren getting into cricket has dropped dramatically. They know they made a mistake, and while they can’t do anything about it until the end of the current rights deal in 2019, they have ringfenced 8 of the 36 matches for FTA TV in the proposal. I wonder, is that enough? Will it be eight of the early league fixtures, making it difficult to follow, or will it include the semi-finals and the final? Only time will tell, but it seems you’re still going to need a pay TV subscription to have much of an idea of what’s going on.

Two Twenty20 tournaments could mean overkill

The ECB are not proposing to replace the current T20 Blast with this city-based tournament – they intend for them to co-exist. This year, the T20 Blast (which does feature all 18 counties) will take place over seven weeks. The new tournament would be planned to start almost immediately after the Blast – I have a feeling even a massive cricket fan like me could get fed up of watching Twenty20 after 12 solid weeks of it.

While there are questions to be answered, I think overall this is a positive step from the ECB and a genuine attempt to inject new life into cricket in this country. They’ve got three years to get it ready – the future of the sport could depend on them getting it right.