Peter Anderson was back at his desk at the County Ground on Friday morning after attending a meeting in London on Thursday.

Acting on behalf of the eighteen first class counties Mr Anderson, along with Stephen Coverdale of Northamptonshire and David Collier from Nottinghamshire had met with ECB Chief Executive Tim Lamb.

Mr Anderson told me: "The major issue under discussion was how we can arrest what is perceived to be the dumbing down of first class cricket. The first-class counties perceive the problems as twofold. Firstly, central contracts deny local members the opportunity to see top-line players, and secondly in some sections of the press County Championship cricket is seen as inconsequential to international cricket.

"The counties are concerned that the number of contracts increases from 12 to 20, and that if England have additional overseas tours which start in early October and end in late March, centrally-contracted players will be unavailable to their counties."

The Somerset Chief Executive continued, "One of the avenues that we are looking at is that an agreement should be struck with the Professional Cricketer's Association that is under employment law acceptable by Brussels, that eight players qualified for England must be on the pitch at any one time. In effect this would mean that three overseas players could be used by the counties.

"One idea that we are starting to talk through is that you could have any number of overseas players on short term contracts who would be available to play during the year as long as there were eight England qualified players on the pitch- we feel that this would make the game more attractive."

Another subject under discussion was the probability of having a wage cap for players salaries.

Mr Anderson said: "What is happening at present is that good county players who won't play for England are being poached by more wealthy counties, and therefore wages are being driven up.

"Clubs like Somerset can't compete in this wage spiral, neither can the game as a whole, so something has to give. The problem at the moment is that county players cannot earn more than the lowest paid England contract players.

"This might be all right from the England perspective but it actually restricts counties from being competitive by signing players to fill gaps when they feel that they are going to be weak in their current team."

The Somerset Chief Executive is due to go to London again on January 23rd, to a meeting to discuss the future structure of first class cricket.

"We will also be looking to try to rationalise the growing problem of the interface between first class cricket and the recreational game. For instance do we need Second XI, Under-19 and Board XI cricket, and do we need to put so much emphasis on Premier League cricket, all of which costs lots of money?"

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