County Twenty20 is back and hoping to cash in on World Cup success

English cricket relaunches its county Twenty20 tournament tonight confident that it is on course for record attendances in defiance of a threatened breakaway by the Test-match counties and suggestions that illegal Indian bookmakers will be lurking behind every main stand offering bribes to fix games. A more problematic revamp is difficult to imagine, but the ECB can console itself that if the Test-match counties are agitating then Twenty20 cricket in England must be felt to be potentially lucrative, and if bookmakers' interest abroad has been aroused then at least that is due to the success in selling TV rights outside this country. Comparisons between Friends Provident T20 and the hype of the Indian Premier League will be inevitable, even more so since representatives of the Test-match counties held a fateful meeting in March with Lalit Modi, the IPL commissioner who is now suspended pending investigations into his business practices, and emerged with the enthusiasm of small boys who had been allowed a peek at the sweet shop. Even tonight's opening match, between Sussex and Somerset at Hove, England's two qualifiers for last season's Champions League, is a reminder that England will have no representatives in this year's world club tournament because Modi, wrongly assuming that English cricket would fall obediently into line, forced through tournament dates that clash with the climax to the championship season. For Steve Elworthy, the ECB's director of marketing and communications, a successful overseeing of two World Twenty20 tournaments must have been a breeze compared to the challenge of bringing order to the English counties in one of their periodic bouts of frenzy. "That's probably right," he admitted. "We could have woken up to better headlines. But my job is to deliver a successful tournament, not to prove some people wrong. Everybody wants it to succeed and we need it to succeed. We have had a massive spike since England won the World Twenty20 and we need to build on that. There is a bit of nervousness among some of the counties, but the strategy is working." Another expansion of Twenty20 cricket, with the counties split this year into two groups of nine and an increase in the number of games to 151 from 97, is bound to bring an overall rise in attendances; it would be a disaster if it did not. Elworthy, though, is confident of a bigger prize. "Average attendances are the key," he said. "I would absolutely expect them to go up." The rebellion of the Test-match counties is a very English uprising. They hold occasional meetings and exchange confidential emails, asserting that for all 18 counties to play Twenty20 cricket is unsustainable. They examine their balance sheets, overstretched by ambitious ground developments, encouraged by the ECB's policy of competitive tendering for international matches. They privately discuss radical solutions to an intractable problem. Then the competition begins again and they fall obediently into line to support a tournament they don't entirely believe in because not to do so would be commercial suicide. It has taken a South African to believe in the potential of English county cricket. "I came here with no preconceived ideas," Elworthy said. "I believe that we have a fantastic product." Whatever the Test-match counties' misgivings, Elworthy's arrival at the ECB has brought a concerted marketing campaign beyond anything achieved by the counties themselves. TwelfthMan , the England cricket "fans community", has more than 250,000 members, who can opt to receive personalised emails about fixtures in their area, and other social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter are increasingly utilised. Things have gone a long way since the days when county cricket's idea of marketing was to put a fixture list up in the members' bar. "The counties were at different levels of development," Elworthy said. "Each individual county marketing campaign is sent to us for analysis. If a county asks for £2,000 to put an advert on a trailer on a roundabout we say you could spend that more wisely to reach tens of thousands of people – not just those who drive around that roundabout. All counties also get a weekly report, which allows them to study what the other counties are doing. They are all encouraged to learn from best practice." As for the danger of match-rigging, the ECB continues to believe that the system where players can confidentially report approaches will be sufficient. But the ICC's anti-corruption unit does not concern itself with domestic cricket. Senior ECB officials have been only too happy to suggest that the IPL is vulnerable to match-rigging for this very reason. Why should England's Twenty20 tournament be any different? Elworthy said that "integrity and credibility must be the key principles" and conceded: "The next step, if it was necessary, would be to set up our own anti-corruption body. It's a general problem for all one-day games, not just Twenty20. It has to be stamped out. "You have got to believe in the honesty of the game. You have to believe these are isolated cases. Why do players go out there day in, day out for the county season? It's for the love of the game." Exactly what grand design English cricket intends to give its heart to, however, is still not yet clear.