AS sure as night follows day or Lancashire will find a way to blow their chances of winning the Championship, major change is coming to county cricket.

The England and Wales Cricket Board is set to inform the counties this week of its recommendations for an overhaul of the game, to be introduced at the beginning of the 2010 season, after testing the water by releasing the outline plan through a national newspaper.

Central to their strategy is finding a way to accommodate an English Premier League, the ECB's answer to the success of the inaugural Indian Twenty20 tournament, which involved huge sums of money and the world's top stars.

One way they would clear space for the EPL is to cut down on the number of Championship games, from 16 to around 14, and the suggestion is that the two division system would be ditched for a new structure involving three conferences of six counties, similar to the model adopted in American sports.

Once the counties receive the proposals through the formal route, the chief executives will meet early next month to discuss them and will sit down with the ECB a few days later to draw up how cricket will operate when the new broadcasting agreement comes into force in 2010.

Tom Sears will take Derbyshire's considered opinions to that meeting and though he has some personal reservations about what he has seen of the proposed changes so far, the chief executive also believes there is plenty to commend in the plans.

“As ever, the devil is in the detail,” he said. “But I think there is some encouraging stuff in there.

“I like the idea of an EPL and I think it is inevitable that it will be driven through. If the ECB can pull it off and bring in the world's best players to stimulate real interest, I think it could be a really exciting competition.

“I'm not sure about conferences in the Championship. It's a massive change just to get rid of two games, so to lose at the most eight days of cricket in such a fundamental change, I think, is a big risk.

“Two division cricket works, in my view, because the games are competitive and it's very easy for people to understand.

“This conference system is a very complicated way of working things and will make it very difficult to follow.

“Ideally, I would keep Championship cricket as it is because I don't accept the argument we are playing too much cricket.

“Players are perfectly happy to play in these additional games, the ECB are happy to set up these additional Twenty20 matches and if it is a problem with player fatigue, play more youngsters out of your academy.”

The key to a successful EPL would be in attracting the world's top players to take part in it and the suggestion is that the stars would effectively be paid by the ECB and held in a bank, which would then allocate players to the EPL teams in a draft.

“I quite like the idea of a draft system but, again, we need to see the detail,” said Sears (pictured).

“My best guess from what we have seen so far is you would contract your one overseas player for the season and they would also say you can have four or five overseas players for the EPL.

“The additional three or four would come from a bank following on the lines of American sport, where the weakest team gets first pick in a draft.

“Everything to level the playing field will be widely accepted, I imagine, and I'm sure Derbyshire supporters would love to see a side with, say, Andrew Symonds, Ricky Ponting and Brett Lee in it for a month.

“It would be a fantastic prospect. How coaches would assimilate them in a side would be a challenge but in a one-off competition, it can be done.

“This talk of every county having one Indian player to attract Indian TV is also something I'm not averse to.

“Whether you get to the situation where you start trading draft picks for cash or multiple draft picks will have to be looked at.

“These are all areas that have to be covered because if there are loopholes there, people will take advantage of them.

“I think there is some really good stuff there but there's only the month of June as a window for EPL and the problem some counties are finding is that it is a very big ask for supporters with families to fork out to come to two or three games in such a short period.

“It's an expensive day out – some of the grounds are charging up to £25 for a seat and everybody knows the economic situation is not great at the moment.

“In an ideal world, you would spread the EPL out but realistically that can't happen because of the availability of players.”

Plainly, there is plenty to resolve before the structure is agreed – the EPL, the Championship format, whether or not to scrap a one-day competition, whether there is a need for a salary cap.

The future of the game is at stake. It is evolving and there will be change but what is to be hoped is that the fundamental strength, which focuses on Test cricket, remains central to the ECB's vision of the future.

However much money Twenty20 attracts for now, it is only a sideshow.