When Sven-Goran Eriksson was handed the England chalice, the howls of protest from less enlightened corners of our island ("Sweden? Schweden!") left you wondering how closely some of us follow our other national sports. Hadn't we noticed that the England cricket team had been turned around by a Zimbabwean? Were we really so blinkered to imagine that a man who knew nothing of 1966 and all that, of 35 years of hurt - and Hurst - could possibly understand what was needed to regenerate the national side? Oh yes - we were. Well, just because football was slow to learn from cricket, doesn't mean cricket has to reciprocate: the beautiful game has a lesson to teach the noble one, and don't let the snobs tell you otherwise. It goes like this: the influx of big-name overseas players into the Premiership, which has grown from a trickle into a torrent since the arrival of Jurgen Klinsmann in July 1994, has exposed the best young English players to world-class quality weekend in, weekend out. A generation of players like Beckham, Owen, Scholes, Gerrard, Ashley Cole, and Ferdinand has grown up surrounded by international excellence - not just Vinny Jones - with the result that a match in a stronghold like Munich suddenly doesn't seem quite so foreign, quite so forbidding. Say what you like about the quality of the Germans, but a scoreline of 1-5 is no fluke.

Unfortunately, Xenophobes Plc has a bigger stake in county cricket than it does in domestic football: the resistance to more than one overseas player per county is a fact of life. This is crazy, not least because a more open-minded attitude could be the only way the county game is going to survive. The new academy (run, you'll note, by an Australian) makes the need for county cricket to adapt even more pressing, because the academy now represents the second tier in English cricket behind the Test team, a position occupied for too long - and too complacently - by the counties. Now is their chance to hit back: allow three overseas players per team, and watch the quality rise.

The standard argument against Johnny Foreigner is that he blocks the careers of our brave young English hopefuls. Again, crazy. This wasn't a problem in the 1970s - when England managed to win three series against Australia - and it shouldn't be now, particularly with 18 teams doing the rounds.

The fact is our youngsters would be much better off facing an opening attack of Shaun Pollock and Jason Gillespie than Paul Taylor and Michael Strong. Overseas stars would help, not hinder; they would pass on knowledge; they would set an example; they would be like in-house demi-gods, dispensing their gifts to those keen enough to learn. Just look at Stephen Fleming: his presence at Middlesex has helped bring the best out of Owais Shah, who started the season as a wastrel, and ended it as the Young Cricketer of the Year. The increasingly congested international calendar means that not all of them would be available for the entire season, so all the more reason to have three. They could even play on a pay-per-game basis to stop the purse-strings groaning.

More overseas staff would also solve a problem that we're always whining about. It would squeeze out the trundlers who have no hope of ever playing for England, thus raising the standard, as Lord MacLaurin might put it.

And, maybe, just maybe, the crowds at county grounds would start to put those three-men-and-a-dog gags out of business. Now for Albania.

Lawrence Booth is assistant editor of Wisden.com. His column appears every week.

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