[Ska'dForLife-WBA]

Don't follow cricket that closely but I don't see the attraction of a team named Manchester or Leeds unless you are from those places!!  Why not make it Lancashire and Yorkshire and make this either a competition that you qualify for the previous season and drop the need for it to be at Test Match venues only??  The county set up is too ingrained in most fans to now introduce "new" teams to the mix.

Basically, both India and Australia have had huge success in creating domestic T20 competitions that last for four to six weeks with matches played almost every day during that period. The TV rights alone have brought in a fortune, and both leagues are in the top ten sporting competitions in the world by average attendance (the IPL is currently 5th after the NFL, Bundesliga, EPL and Aussie Rules League with average gates of 32k; the Big Bash is 7th, behind Major League Baseball, with 30k). Understandably, the ECB wants to replicate that success in England; whether it's to get in on the gravy train or to popularise cricket with a new generation, I suppose you have to make your own mind up. It's probably a bit of both.

Until now, it hasn't been possible to have a similar event in this country because we have eighteen counties, and even divided into two groups you can't cram that many fixtures into a month, so the existing T20 Blast between the counties takes place between May and August. As Snoots has pointed out, it's pretty successful, and it does draw in the crowds for some of the big games, but I think the potential is there for domestic T20 to be an even bigger attraction *if* they could get a one-month competition off the ground. However, understandably, if you did it along county lines some would have to be left out, and that's the obstacle. No one wants to lose their status at the top table. That's why the idea of eight entirely new teams has been green-lighted.

What you suggest about having the best counties qualify for the "super league" each year would throw up its own problems. There's the potential that the bigger counties could come to dominate financially while the smaller ones wither away (what's happened with football, basically). They'd also get a monopoly on the world's top players each year, while teams who didn't qualify would end up with the best of what's left; again, like football.

I think the basic idea, on paper, is sound: *if* you could pull upwards of 100,000 people into the major cricket grounds every week through August without damaging or diminishing the existing county system, then it would be a whole new era for cricket. However, I think all of us on here are old enough and wise enough to know that things are never that simple, and that the best-laid plans rarely survive their first contact with the real world.