Somerset boss calls for Twenty20 revamp

Andy Nash, Somerset's chairman, has urged England's cricket set-up to adapt the standards set by the Indian board in running Twenty20 cricket. The Twenty20 game has been carried forward at speed by other nations and the ECB has been left in the wake, and Nash, who toured with Somerset for the Champions Twenty20 League, said it must find a way to connect with fans in India.

"What I have seen in India is Bollywood, whereas we are more Under Milk Wood," he told the Daily Telegraph. "If you compare the match we played against the Deccan Chargers the spectator experience was like an Elvis Presley concert. I think back to Twenty20 finals day at Edgbaston and it was like watching Des O'Connor. It was very flat and very uninspiring.

"We have to think long and hard about how we improve the customer experience. When you go to India and sit in a stadium that is full the contrast between that and the way we offer up Twenty20 cricket could hardly be more stark.

"I'm not saying we need the full Bollywood treatment. That might not be right, but we have to do better than we have so far. In Twenty20 cricket we have been shown a clean pair of heels and we have a lot of work to do to get ourselves back on their level. There is a balance to be struck, but we are moving in the right direction."

The main challenges facing the ECB are how to compete with the IPL, how to attract overseas players, and how to judge how many matches the public wants. From 2010, the newly expanded Twenty20 tournament, named P20, will include two groups of nine teams and be played over a longer period of the season to build on the appetite for the shortest format. The ECB sees this as a medium between the existing format and the international flavour of the IPL, but Nash was still critical of how England - where the Twenty20 format was born - was "slow to move on".

"People have said Twenty20 is yet another English invention which we have allowed others to capitalise on," he said. "We have been slow to move but we are trying to move a juggernaut which is the England and Wales cricket set-up. A lot of members are still on smelling salts that we are playing with a white ball."

"I used to think we had done well to get 6,000 Somerset fans in England. We have to set ourselves much more ambitious targets for reaching fans in India and work out how we reach out to them. Cricket is business in India and our business is cricket."