A quarter of players on the county circuit have changed their mind about the relative importance of the County Championship since the start of the season and the introduction of big-money Twenty20 matches, a survey by the players' union has revealed.

When the Professional Cricketers' Association (PCA) canvassed 334 players before the start of the season, 88 per cent said that the County Championship was the most important domestic competition, but when the PCA put the same question to them before publishing its survey yesterday, that had dropped to 62 per cent.

The news that England will play five winner-takes-all matches worth about £500,000 per player per game against the All Stars team of Allen Stanford, the American billionaire, has made some reconsider their priorities, as has the mooted Champions League, with a first prize of £2.5million. Almost three quarters of players believed that the money offered by the Indian Premier League (IPL), the unauthorised Indian Cricket League (ICL) and Stanford would motivate young players to hone their skills for Twenty20 instead of longer forms of the game.

However, although 90 per cent of players stated that the NatWest Pro40 tournament has no value, there is strong support for County Championship cricket and a belief that the proposal by Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, to have three conferences of six teams playing ten matches each does not offer enough first-class cricket and would weaken standards.

The PCA wants the ECB to retain two divisions in the championship and to increase prize-money for the winners to £750,000 from £100,000, with the second division champions receiving £250,000 instead of £30,000.

The union also canvassed the counties on whether the number of Kolpak and overseas players should be limited. There are 62 players in county cricket this season who are not qualified to play for England, up from 30 in 2007. Fourteen counties want a minimum of eight England-qualified players per match, three want it to be nine and one seven.

The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will be told at the ICC annual conference in Dubai on Sunday that it has no right to ban English counties with ICL players from the proposed Champions League.

Officials from the BCCI and the IPL said last Sunday that they would invite Pakistan to take England's place if the ECB could not guarantee that it will clear only teams without ICL players. But as one of the original organisers, with India, Australia and South Africa, England will argue that India cannot decide the participants. “We're one of the four countries that set up the Champions League and we've always said we'd be meeting at the end of the month, when we'll be drawing up the rules and regulations,” an ECB spokesman said yesterday.

Jeremy Roberts, the lawyer acting for the ICL, said that the ICC could face legal action in Britain for restraint of trade if it sanctions an event that bans ICL players. “The ICC sanctioning an event is different from them organising one, but there have been sufficient things happening here to come under the jurisdiction of the English courts,” Roberts said.

In the PCA survey, 45 per cent of players said that they would consider playing in the ICL, regardless of a ban.

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