Another domestic cricket season is upon us, and never has the game been under so big a threat.

After months of deliberations, ponderings and head scratching from the ECB in their bid to make the county game more appealing to the masses, they have come up with a schedule which is at best baffling and at worst downright daft!

The earliest ever start to a season sees Lancashire, who have already had their first-class game with Durham Uni rained off without a ball being bowled, play three Championship games before the end of April. You will get good odds on four full days play in any of them!

The whole of June and a fair chunk of July is then wiped out almost utterly by the extended Friends Provident t20 before the final eight Championship matches are crammed into the last eight weeks of the season.

And in between are a smattering of Clydesdale Bank 40 games. The fans - and the players for that matter - will struggle to keep tabs on who is playing what and when.

The reason for such an early start was originally to allow the two Friends Provident t20 finalists to play in the mega-bucks Champions League in October.

But now that tournament has been moved forward and overlaps the closing weeks of the campaign and the ECB's showpiece Lord's final. And there are real fears the two teams who qualify may well send their first team to play in the Twenty20 bonanza and leave the seconds behind to fulfil the final County Championship fixtures, making a farce of the ECB's flagship domestic competition.

And next year the ECB are talking about replacing the two division Championship with a three-conference format to reduce the number of games to 12 which would mean the second division clubs have nothing to play for this year.

The ECB see Twenty20 as the saviour of the county game, and one look at the balance sheets of the clubs show that could well be the case.

But fans know when they are being bled dry and 16 group matches in the t20 in the same old regionalised groups is not something which will get the pulse racing.

And even though some counties have used their allowance of two overseas players for the tournament to attract some big names, the increasingly crowded international calendar married with the big bucks on offer in the Indian Premier League mean the bulk of the game's world stars won't be in action here this summer.

Lancashire were among a number of counties championing a new franchise city-based t20 competition drawing in the best English and overseas players in what truly would have been a competition worth watching.

But the ECB, worried about losing their stranglehold on the game, dismissed it almost without a second thought. And their much-championed alternative of an English Premier League in which counties could field four overseas stars and which included an IPL side died a death.

Watching the IPL on ITV4 over the last few weeks, again just goes to show the ECB have let a brilliant chance to drag the game into the 21st Century slip through their fingers.

And for that, they could pay the ultimate price.

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