With the 2010-11 international cricket season on the horizon with a T20 on Sunday and the imminent announcement of the new format for the domestic T20 competition it's no wonder my thoughts turned to cricketing matters as I took the morning ramble around the regular circuit.

Presumably I'm going to end up being labelled some kind of reactionary, but I should preface my remarks by stating I haven't seen a lot of T20, and much of what I have seen hasn't been the subject of close scrutiny with an intense scrute, so I may well be wide of the mark in some areas.

In any case, what I have seen has been the Australian domestic and international version rather than the all-star singing and dancing IPL version.

There's no doubt, however, that the Australian cricket season has become uncomfortably close to moribund and the new arrangements that followed World Series Cricket have become old hat rather rapidly. It worked for a while, but much of that was due to the regular presence of the West Indies in the early years and Australian dominance through the nineties and noughties.

Now, you can decry commercial influence all you like (and I frequently do) but I suspect developments in the Australian camp back in the late eighties - the appointment of Bob Simpson as coach, the conscious selection policy that brought through the likes of Steve Waugh, David Boon and Glenn McGrath - were influenced by a need to start winning if Australian cricket was going to hold off challengers for the title of the country's summer TV sport of choice.

My chronology might be slightly awry, but I seem to recall basketball as the new emerging force at the time. The fact that cricket has continued to dominate may well be the result of good luck rather than good management. Cricket, of course, with a historic position and long-term sponsorships was able to extract a premium price for sponsorship rights, and without going into detailed research you'd suspect that the demise of the old National Basketball League had a lot to do with an inability to parlay short-term progress into long-term financial stability.

The latest threat comes in the form of the A League soccer (yes I know I should be saying football) though a recent incident involving the Northern Fury suggests the football authorities have a fair bit to do in the getting their act together department.

There's no doubt that the wheels have started to fall off the existing arrangements for international cricket during the Australian summer.

The first casualty, as far as Hughesy's concerned, even before the demise of the visiting teams play off one dayers, was the old Sheffield Shield, which finds itself being pushed further and further into the background. One suspects that this process will continue with the new T20 league.

That's hardly surprising, given the non-appearance of Shield cricket on TV screens. That may change in the brave new world of multi-channel digital TV, but I won't be holding my breath. It’d be nice to have fans discussing the successes or otherwise of their state team but I suspect the continuing absence of the top players from the Shield scene will be enough to rule out any form of telecast in the future.

On the international scene, the two visiting teams, two test series and a three-way one day competition format worked for a while, but there were the predictable difficulties when it came to having two less than dominant sides playing off for the right to take on Australia in the final series.

At the start of that three-way tussle when one team was the West Indies you had the prospect of seeing Greenidge, Haynes, Richards, Lloyd and Richardson in action with the bat, and while four quicks operating off the long run mightn't have delivered flurries of activity from the bat that had a fair bit to do with the quality of the bowling sent down by Roberts, Holding, Garner, Marshall, Walsh and Ambrose.

In any case, we now have the prospect of a limited over mini-series against Sri Lanka, the potential failure to regain the Ashes through the Christmas-New Year period and another limited overs series against the Old Enemy.

Presumably we can expect that to be very close to the end of international limited overs fixtures in Australia during January and February.

There are going to be a number of interesting, rather tricky issues that will need to be addressed when it comes to sorting out this new T20 competition, so from here it's into the realm of speculation as we consider some possibilities.

The first issue is going to be how you turn six domestic teams into eight. There's the obvious question of where to locate the new franchises, and I've seen suggestions that there'll be second teams in Sydney and Melbourne, and indications that they've looked at various regional options, with Townsville apparently one of the options.

Encountering Jimbo around the half-way point on the morning circuit, I heard a further suggestion. Go to New Zealand was Jimbo's guess, one that I was inclined to downplay due to the fact that you'd be splitting a lucrative income stream. North Island and South Island would be a pretty obvious split, and would allow the existing state teams to maintain something resembling their current identities.

Now, regardless of whereabouts in Australia these new franchises are set up, there's going to be the issue of spreading six domestic sides around eight franchises. The simplest solution would be to split New South Wales and Victoria, which would probably go down rather well in the other states but would probably get the big Blue veto.

Presumably we'll see the eight franchises going into an IPL-style auction and making their selections from a player pool that will contain most of the world's leading players (dependent, of course, on the absence of competing competitions elsewhere around the world).

Any other format is presumably going to be seen as favouring the established centres to the detriment of the new franchises as far as short-term competitiveness is concerned.

Another thorny bit is going to kick in if and when similar leagues start up in, say South Africa and England. What happens if, say Shane Watson has been a member of the sides that have qualified out of the IPL and the Australian and English equivalents? Which one does he get to play for in any Champions League?

Fortunately, he wouldn't find himself in a four-way tug of war because a South African competition would presumably clash with either the Australian T20 or the Australian Test series.

At the moment, it seems the Indian commitment takes precedence, and it would be a fairly simple matter of giving the guernsey to whatever franchise you signed with first, so that Australian players with IPL contracts would go that way, but as new competitions come into the picture you could have an Indian who plays for the winning side in the IPL but started somewhere else having to play for his Australian side because he signed for them before the contract with his IPL franchise came into play.

Pardon me for being cynical, but I can't quite see that scenario being accepted on the subcontinent.

That gives me the chance to sound off about one of the issues that has been quietly been burning up Hughesy's guts for the past year or so. Why are Mitchell Johnson and Shane Watson no longer Queenslanders? It's not as if Johnson will be playing too many games for W.A. even if he does live in Perth, and you won't see Watson in a blue cap too often either. Under these arrangements icky Ponting would presumably be a New South Welshman as well.

Johnson and Watson mightn't have played too many T20 games for Queensland in the domestic comp, but had the Bulls got to the Champions League their presence on the side would have been rather handy when you're looking at your chances of getting your hands on the big prize money.

In the couple of days since I tapped out the preceding remarks, a couple of points have been elucidated. For a start the big subcontinental money isn't going to be allowed to buy up any of the new city or regional-based franchises. How much interest a 33% stake in any of them will attract will be interesting to see, as will the cash flow from potentially lucrative sponsorship deals.

In the absence of an IPL-style auction, which seems to have been ruled out more or less from the start, with a strict salary cap and a possible draft to distribute the talent it'll be interesting to see how they work the six teams into eight franchises side of things, at least as far as the initial version of the competition is concerned.

Now, since there'll presumably be no overlap between the franchises and the sides fielded in the other interstate competitions one way to do it at the start would be to do a straightforward split of Victoria and New South Wales, but as indicated I suspect that sort of suggestion won't wash with the cricketing powerbrokers in those states.

One way around that in the beginning would be to allow each of the existing states to keep a certain number of players from their contracted roster and place everyone else into a sort of draft. The current state teams could keep, say five players, with the specification that there would have to be at least two 'specialist' bats or bowlers in the five.

Which would, I think, make things interesting.

That would mean, using New South Wales as an example, that their current squad, including as it does Simon Katich, Michael Clarke, Shane Watson, Nathan Bracken, Stuart Clark, Steven Smith, Phil Jaques, Moises Henriques, Brad Haddin, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc, Philip Hughes, Usman Khawaja and David Warner (to pick out some of the names that have been bandied around for Australian selection) might be cut to a core of (say) the two Clarks, Warner, Watson and Haddin.

Other states mightn't have the same comparative riches to choose from, but they'd all have to free up one or two names they'd prefer to keep. You'd then (at least this is the way it'd go in my scenario) give the two extra franchises the chance to pick five players under the same 'at least two specialist bats and bowlers' conditions. That might give a Sydney franchise a chance to start with, say, Jaques, Hughes, Henriques, Lee and Hazlewood. Not a bad core to start from...

Each player would have some nominal valuation, which I'd assume would be based on a percentage of their existing contract figure, so the next stage of the process would involve deducting what each team had already spent out of their salary cap and having each franchise make offers to, say, seven players out of the remaining pool with offers being limited to the contract figure as a base figure, or that figure plus ten or twenty per cent. Players would have the right to choose which offers to accept, so you'd have close to a full playing roster more or less in place before you started looking at overseas players to add to the mix.

Some sides, of course, would have had initial offers knocked back, so they mightn’t have a full dozen on the books at this stage, butI’d guess that with the imports coming into play around here (the various franchises would’ve already been negotiating with the overseas players before this, and would probably have provisional deals worked out, so if you had a tentative arrangement with Daniel Vettori you mightn’t have been looking to chase Xavier Doherty, for example.

Actually, the build-up through the early part of the season might be an interesting little exercise in generating interest. Make the initial announcements about the five core players within a fortnight of the end of the football season, and get the where are they going? speculation about everybody else kicking in.

Have the next part of the process due to be finalised by, say a week before the test series kick off, and squads finalised completely by Christmas. Run through the rest ofthe tests around Boxing Day and New Year, and you’d have the fans looking forward to the Bigger Bash through the latter part of January and into February.

It’d work for me, anyway...

In hindsight it might have been better if Australia had lost the Second Test against Pakistan.

That’s not taking anything away from a remarkable comeback from a seemingly impossible position, but I’d be happier if the comeback had been prompted by Australian tactical and strategic nous rather than an apparent Pakistani lack thereof.

Seriously, from a position where we were effectively eight for eighty it’s as much a case of Pakistan throwing away opportunities as Australia grabbing them.

Describing Pakistan’s tactics in the pre-lunch session as baffling is an understatement, though perhaps, given the number of dropped catches involved, it was a matter of waiting for Siddle and Hussey to make a mistake rather than being proactive in inducing one.

It’s fair to suggest that effective eight for eighty was the result of extreme good luck rather than good management.

While the win puts Australia on the way to a three-nil win in the three test series, which mightn’t suggest significant room for substantial improvement, the way we got there suggests that there are serious issues that need to be looked at.

The most obvious of those is the Australian game plan.

And the problem there is that it’s the Australian game plan. It seems that once the leadership group has made up its mind about the way we’re going to approach the game, that’s it.

In other words, the captain’s decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.

That kind of mindset might have been OK back in the McGrath/ Warne/ Hayden/ Gilchrist era, but even then it wasn’t a hundred per cent foolproof.

I think it’s fair to argue that one of the reasons we lost The Ashes in 2005 because we stuck with a decision to insert the opposition if we won the toss despite the loss of one of the key components in the game plan.

Given McGrath’s last minute unavailability for the Second Test, surely it made more sense to choose to bat while we worked out an alternative bowling plan.

Given the fact that the wicket on offer in Sydney at the start of 2010 was hardly your typical SCG deck, and the fact that Ponting stated that batting was going to be difficult why did we decide to bat first?

Given that an inability to take twenty wickets and a failure to score enough runs batting first were significant factors in the 2009 Ashes disaster, conditions in Sydney should have produced game plans that took those issues into account, with the toss deciding which one was implemented.

In other words, on that wicket, winning the toss should have been an automatic decision to bowl. Losing the toss would have almost certainly have resulted in an invitation to bat, so under the circumstances either result would provide an opportunity to work on areas that could use a bit of attention.

More than that, it seems fairly obvious that batsmen from the subcontinent don’t like batting on decks that are doing a bit. There’s a fair case for arguing that no one does like batting on a greentop, but when it comes down to it Indians and Pakistanis are arguably more averse than most.

Add to that the fact that Watson’s run of form at the top of the order gives us the chance to go in with a four-man pace attack plus Hauritz and possibly North to bowl spin, it’s not going to be a case of overworking your bowlers.

With all that in mind, Ponting’s decision to bat first is baffling in the extreme. But if we were going to bat so that we could address that lack of runs in the first dig factor, then surely there needed to be an emphasis on getting your head down and occupying the crease for as long as possible.

Looking at those Day One dismissals, that was hardly the mindset on display.

From where I’m sitting it’s pretty obvious that we’re nowhere near as good as we think we are.

What worries me is what’s likely to happen when we run up against an opponent who’s inclined to twist the knife once it’s inserted rather than sitting back and waiting for the victim to bleed to death.