"If it was up to me I would have no overseas players in our game as they take up the places of home-grown players…the fact is overseas players take a place that could go to someone from within the counties." Coming as they do from Robert Croft - a man that contracts foot-in-the mouth- disease every September - those comments could easily be laughed off. The sad thing though is that there are quite a few that will buy into Croft's argument.

Let's look at the issue objectively. Most people would agree that English cricket - post Hutton, May, Trueman and company - was at its strongest in the seventies and early eighties. That also happened to be a period in which every county - lilywhite Yorkshire the exception - could boast of at least one world-class import. Vivian Richards and Joel Garner at Somerset, Barry Richards and Gordon Greenidge - and later Malcolm Marshall - at Hampshire, Javed Miandad at Glamorgan, Bishan Singh Bedi at Northamptonshire, Richard Hadlee and Clive Rice at Nottinghamshire, Garth Le Roux and Imran Khan at Sussex, the list leads like a Who's Who of world cricket. There were others that tasted the county experience for a summer or two - Sunil Gavaskar at Somerset being the most prominent Indian.

You'd have to be an inhabitant of cloud cuckoo land to think that playing alongside these players didn't benefit the homegrown talent. That generation gave English cricket Gooch, Gower, Botham, Gatting and Willis. This summer, reams have been written about Botham's Ashes of 1981. Its no big secret how Botham felt about Richards and Garner playing for Somerset and how much he gained by playing alongside them.

The scenario hasn't changed much 20 years later. The best players on the county circuit are all Australian castaways. Darren Lehmann (Yorkshire), Stuart Law (Essex), Jamie Cox (Somerset) and Ian Harvey (Gloucestershire) have all played starring roles for their counties. The only great spinners that county batsmen have had to face in recent seasons have been émigrés - Shane Warne, Saqlain Mushtaq and Muttiah Muralitharan. Needless to say, Mr. Croft isn't quite out of that drawer.

It doesn't take a genius to tell you that you can only ever be the best by playing alongside the best. If Croft has his way, young English talent will be cruelly exposed on the international stage. On a county stage shorn of foreign talent, they might briefly resemble Gulliver in Lilliput. But the big bad world will have some nasty surprises in store - McGrath, Pollock and Murali to name just three. Those brought up on a nourishing diet of second-rate trundlers could well starve in such a situation.

Dileep Premachandran is assistant editor of Wisden.com in India.

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