Who would want to have been the person in charge of seating arrangements when the 18 county chairmen dined at Lord's last night before today's supposedly critical meeting? Did the maître d' set one long table for 18, or two of nine, with lobster for the Test ground guardians and fish fingers for the rest?

Listening to some of the comment over the past few days, this would appear to be the future of cricket, irrevocably split between haves and have nots, if plans for the “New Twenty20” were accepted. Instead, they are understood to have found no favour from the ECB executive board yesterday.

In this febrile context of distrust it fell to Keith Bradshaw, the MCC chief executive, and David Stewart, the Surrey chairman, to point out that, far from splitting the game, their plan makes players from all 18 counties eligible for the nine-team event and that all 18, too, would take a share of profits estimated at £47million in the first year.

Criticism that Bradshaw and Stewart should not have produced the document - which may or may not have the backing of MCC and may or may not have breached an obscure ECB code - deliberately created a smokescreen around the plans. The good sense behind the paper was obscured.

There is a fundamental problem about England and an equivalent of the Indian Premier League (IPL). We can have an English Premier League by name - Giles Clarke, the ECB chairman, coined the term when the 2008 season was launched in April - but what is “Premier” about a competition with at least 18 teams?

One reason for the IPL success was its thick spread of talent. This is the point that Bradshaw and Stewart have made. Having spoken to a sports business group, sports lawyers and City businesses, they see nine teams as the optimum, but the ECB is constitutionally committed to twice that number.

Setting up a company, New T20 Ltd, to run the competition, with the ECB as a major stakeholder, appears to be a way around the dilemma. The trouble, as Jim Cumbes said in resigning as chairman of the chief executives committee, is that panic and paranoia are smothering serious debate.

It has to be good for English cricket that new money wants to invest in the game, which is not to say that every hand should be snatched in vulgar haste. But, if any competition is to match the IPL, it needs support, either tacit or unspoken, from the Indians.

The background is high suspicion between the ECB and the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), particularly Lalit Modi, the leading architect of the IPL. Modi is right to believe that the ECB has been unenthusiastic about his lucrative brainchild. If Indians are to play in England, he will want English stars in the IPL.

For their part, the ECB thinks that Modi is being mischievously obstructive over player eligibility for the Champions League. Talks will resume this week, but Modi has yet to accept that the ECB is constrained by employment law on participation of players who have appeared in the rebel Indian Cricket League. Clarke would prefer to deal with other BCCI officials such as Sharad Pawar, the president, who persuaded Zimbabwe to pull out of the 2009 ICC World Twenty20 tournament in England. But ECB complaints about venues for the tour to India in November may unite BCCI opposition rather than split the hierarchy.

How timely for the ECB that Andrew Flintoff will rejoin the England squad at Headingley Carnegie today. Even though Peter Moores, the head coach, refused to say that selection is assured for the second npower Test against South Africa, which starts on Friday, Flintoff's return is the one event that will distract attention from the ECB's present squabbles.

* Yorkshire are seeking special dispensation to enable Azeem Rafiq to become eligible for their first team before he is able to obtain a British passport when he turns 18 in February. Rafiq, the Pakistan-born off-spinner, whose ineligibility led to Yorkshire's exit from the Twenty20 Cup, remains available for Yorkshire’s second XI and bowled five overs at a cost of 28 runs for them against Durham on Monday. The ECB is yet to decide on his future eligibility for England Under-17, whom he has already represented.