Twenty20 cricket has been the biggest success story in English cricket for years and now it looks as if the counties will get their wish for an expanded competition.
The first-class counties met to discuss next season's fixture list on Monday and top of the agenda was cashing in on the popularity of the inaugral Twenty20 Cup which reaches its climax at a sold-out Trent Bridge on Saturday week where Nottinghamshire say they could have sold another 15,000 tickets.
Sussex favour a proposal to split the 18 counties into two groups of nine with four games home and away, but fitting it into a domestic calender which will be even busier next year because of the end-of-season ICC Trophy is another thing.
There is also the counter-attraction of the Euro 2004 football tournament in Portugal. Twenty20 played to packed audiences all over the country last month but would it be able to compete next summer against the counter-attraction of, say, an England v Germany quarter-final?
Sussex chief executive Hugh Griffiths said: "Scheduling an expanded tournament is the biggest problem. There are reservations about going head-to-head with a major football tournament so one of the options is to play in early July.
"But by then we will have lost half an hour of daylight so if we start games at 5pm instead of 5.30pm are we going to lose some of our audience? If there was no other competition it wouldn't be a problem."
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