I like the enthusiasm with which Giles Clarke, the new and bright-eyed chairman of the ECB, approaches his role, but he appears to have lost the plot in his short-sighted admiration for the innovations of the Indian Premier League (IPL). His extraordinary admission yesterday that in a kneejerk response to events in India he has asked the Domestic Structure Review Group (DSRG) to consider a new team structure for Twenty20 cricket in England and Wales is wide of the mark.

For a start, the DSRG has failed to report on anything for too long. It was “sitting” for most of last year, chaired by Hugh Morris, but after months of indecision and the employment of a market research firm, presumably at considerable cost, it changed its chairman when Morris became managing director of England cricket. Paul Russell, the Glamorgan chairman, is conducting the reconstituted group's affairs and one hopes that the other members, including Mike Gatting, “managing director of cricket partnerships” but still, one trusts, possessed of some common sense, will tell the ECB chairman to sit down and reflect.

Presumably he is motivated by a desperation to generate enough new television money (Sony paid £500million for ten years for the IPL rights) to be able to pay the England team even more to keep them free of the IPL's clutches. (So far only Dimitri Mascarenhas, a one-day specialist and fringe England player, has joined the IPL). As chairman of Somerset, Clarke should know, however, that Twenty20 cricket has been the ECB's greatest marketing success and a boon to all 18 first-class clubs, not least because their supporters, including some new ones attracted by the format, identify closely with the local team. It has been the best means of attracting new members since the advent of the original 40-over Sunday League in 1969.

Expand the competition a little, by all means, without overkilling the giddy new format, as they are about to do in India; and at the same time get rid of the NatWest Pro40 League, at least until one-day internationals are played over 40 rather than 50 overs, as they may eventually be. But ignore the chairman's plea that the DSRG “consider whether sides should be able to field teams comprising four England-qualified players, four under-23 England-qualified players and three overseas/unqualified players”. By all means put a limit on the number of unqualified players, but otherwise artificial limitations will only confuse.

The DSRG has also been asked to investigate “an extended Twenty20 domestic competition and other cup competitions”. How many different county competitions are we going to have? Are not four supposed to be too many? “DSRG has been asked to report back to the Board [ECB] as a matter of urgency,” the press release said. Since the proposals are supposed to be for 2009 onwards and the group has been mulling over its options for more than a year, that injunction ought not to have been necessary.