Wednesday, September 12, 2001 John Buchanan's criticism of county cricket is wide of the mark. England's domestic game is far from perfect but the problem is not the number of games played. It is easy to snipe at your opponents when you belong to the top team in the world and tell everyone else how to do it. But I think Buchanan should keep his mind on coaching Australia.

County cricketers have always had a heavy workload. When I was at Sussex and Glamorgan back in the 1970s and 1980s we played almost non-stop, and you couldn't call England weak then. They were a real force in world cricket and the international players did not even have the luxury of central contracts to guarantee a period of rest between Test matches. Obviously the game has changed in the last decade but not enough to require a complete overhaul of county cricket.

It is not easy to compare Australia with other countries. They were the top team in the early 1970s but when the West Indian battery (both pace bowlers and attacking batsmen) set about them they had to rethink their whole cricket structure. The Australian Academy is so highly developed that it has almost become an industrial process, a production line of players that slot effortlessly into the national side. England's new national academy might one day achieve the same level of success but we will have to wait and see because the cricket culture is different in England.

What the English academy must incorporate is a programme of coaching seminars and lectures from the greatest players in international cricket, those with a track record of success at the highest level. Coaching qualifications are all well and good if you are teaching ten-year olds but the best way for players at the top level to learn is from those who have experience of the technical skills and mental approach that is required. Counties can help by starting their own academies, like the national one, and putting the national interest before regional ambition, which was not the case when I played.

But coaching can only take you so far. You can play all year in the nets but the only experience that really matters is what is gained in the middle. And that is where I believe county cricket can put its house in order. The academy may or may not work but what will work, I am sure, is if the ECB allowed each county to have two overseas cricketers. When English cricket was strong, almost 20 years ago now, there were three or four overseas players in each squad and the current one-player restriction did not exist. England's great cricketers of that era (Botham, Gower, Gooch, and Gatting) all benefited from playing with, and against, the best players in international cricket. How much must Botham have gained from Viv Richards and Joel Garner?

The point of this is that there is a definite learning curve in playing against the best players. If you never come across them in county cricket it is a shock to the system when you step into the international arena. Australia's new caps play as if they have been playing Test cricket all their lives (because of their state-of-the-art academy) but England's new recruits are more like startled rabbits. Exposure to high-calibre overseas players in county cricket would help England players halfway up the learning curve, even before they begin their international careers.

Javed Miandad, who made over 8000 runs for Pakistan and later coached the national team, was talking to Kamran Abbasi. His column appears every Wednesday.

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