London:

In the last two decades, the English county championship has been played over both one division and two. One-day innings have lasted 40, 45, 50 and 60 overs. The group stage of the Twenty20 competition has gone from five matches to eight, to 10, to 16, down to 10, and back up to 14. The toss has been both contested and uncontested.

I mention all this because this week the England and Wales Cricket Board unveiled its radical new T20 blueprint, and part of the logic behind it is that English cricket never changes. And so the game is being leathered and greased up for its biggest revolution since the last one.

A new T20 competition to begin in 2020, modelled on the Indian Premier League and the Australian Big Bash. Eight city-based teams, invariably named after either a devastating meteorological phenomenon or a particularly hazardous animal, neither of which are native to this country.

Which is just as well: who wants to go and watch a team called the Cardiff Stoats or the Nottingham Light Drizzle? A certain doublethink is being employed here. Change is vital, so the argument goes, because domestic cricket is ailing and moribund.

But change will succeed because domestic cricket is such a fantastic, vibrant product.

Let us, however, indulge the ECB and imagine the new competition is a roaring success. What then? You will have eight franchises, tethered to their regions by paper alone. If you move a franchise in, you can move it out.

Ask fans of the Oakland Raiders, whose beloved American football team are moving 550 miles to Las Vegas.

Test cricket will suffer

Birmingham not hitting its revenue targets? Never mind: maybe Newcastle fancies a go.

The new tournament, held at the height of summer, will siphon away attention and revenue from Test cricket. Eventually, players will follow. Why bother putting your body through five days against Pakistan when you can earn just as much in a single evening at Wembley Stadium?

The best players will be handsomely rewarded. Most of this country’s 400 professional cricketers, however, will not see a penny. For them, the less appealing prospect of playing in weakened domestic tournaments on their existing minuscule salaries, or being forced out of the professional game.

Money will flow into cricket, and it will funnel to the top. And remember: this is all if it succeeds.

Perhaps none of this will occur. Perhaps broadcasters and public do not pour forth. Perhaps that lost decade from 2006 to 2016, when cricket curled up in its pay-TV cottage and drew the curtains, has caused irreparable damage. What then?

English cricket will be left with not only a failed new product, but with a tarnished old one.

This is how sports die.

Cricket could easily go the way of speedway or the greyhounds, or less pessimistically golf or horse racing: puncturing the consciousness during a handful of events, but being largely invisible the rest of the time.

The T20 experiment has been described as a gamble, but gambles involve the possibility of winning. English cricket is being presented with two stark scenarios: dismemberment and death.

Harrison insists the move is “not a gamble”, and he is right there. It is a disaster if it succeeds, and a disaster if it fails.

— The Telegraph Group Ltd, London 2017