The England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) believes that only three first-class counties, Hampshire, Lancashire and Surrey, will support the controversial nine-franchise Twenty20 competition document drawn up by Keith Bradshaw, the secretary of MCC, and David Stewart, the chairman of Surrey, when it is discussed tomorrow.

Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, has had strong words with both men over the past three days and has discussed the matter with several county chairmen. The ECB claims that these chairmen are angry about the document, which was leaked last week.

John Light, the chairman of Gloucestershire, who would be excluded from the franchise, said yesterday that Bradshaw and Stewart should “consider their positions” as board directors.

The ECB remains “not entirely clear” whether the document, known as New Twenty20 Cricket, will be tabled at its meeting tomorrow. It is also damning of what it sees as “a blind belief that Twenty20 will survive”. One of Stewart's allies, Mike Soper, a former chairman of Surrey and defeated for the chairmanship of the ECB last year by Clarke, said yesterday that he may stand when Clarke's term expires in March next year. “I care for the game,” Soper said. “I have no reason to do it for self-aggrandisement because Surrey have made me president next year. We do not seem to be going in the right direction as far as I am concerned. I don't like the way the chairman says, ‘I don't like it' or ‘I am against it'. When I was with David Morgan [the former chairman of the ECB] it was always the board who made that decision. It should not be a one-man show.

“I am worried because I have never seen the game at grass roots so divided and I am going round the counties quite a bit. We seem to be going in a different direction and I wish I knew what that direction was. The people who tell me they do not like his style are the people who voted for me and may be telling me what they think I want to hear. There is a sadness about what is happening.” Soper was also critical of the “sheer greed” of the forthcoming Stanford winner-takes-all Twenty20 match in Antigua.

Bradshaw emphasised yesterday that he put his name to New Twenty20 Cricket in his capacity as a director of the ECB, not in his position with MCC. Although his stance was criticised yesterday by Mike Brearley, the MCC president, who said that he should have consulted the full committee, and Charles Fry, the chairman of the club, who appeared to distance himself from the document, Bradshaw insisted that he had their full support.

“The ECB is properly constituted, so the document will have to be discussed in a properly constituted manner,” Bradshaw said. “If I felt I had no chance of it being accepted, I would not have submitted it.” Nevertheless, the ECB maintains that it warned Bradshaw that MCC should not have an involvement in county cricket.

“Bradshaw is an independent director of the ECB and as such has every right to put forward his opinion,” Brearley wrote in The Observer. “He has fiduciary responsibilities as a director, and these are his alone. On the other hand, he is there as the nominee of the MCC. He has often left the room when he felt there was a conflict between these two roles.

“Any proposal coming from him is liable to be seen as an MCC initiative, and, as such, to have been discussed within MCC and in particular on its committee. This proposal has not been discussed there, so it has no backing, as things stand, from MCC. It might of course agree with and support the views expressed in the plan, but so far there has not been the chance either to do so or to disagree.”