This time every year my Twitter feed becomes jammed with debates about the future of domestic Twenty20 in England. The catalyst is pictures of packed Australian grounds beamed into our living rooms over the Christmas holiday when more of us than usual have the time to be couch potatoes. Compared to the bold colours, Zing wickets and excitable commentary associated with the Big Bash our competition can appear tired and inward-looking. More and more people are starting to think that we should emulate them.

I have always been strongly against any move towards franchises (or indeed a simple reduction in the number of counties) and explained why for All Out Cricket last summer - http://www.alloutcricket.com/cricket/blogs/should-english-twenty20-adopt-the-franchise-model-the-no-argument. In this blog my purpose is not to go over old ground but to address a specific claim made by franchise exponents - that the Big Bash model could be exported to Britain and do as well as it does in Australia.

Quite simply I believe that each cricketing market is very different from the next. Australia in 2011 - when the Big Bash was relaunched with franchises - is not at all the same as England in 2015.

For a start Australia’s previous Twenty20 competition had six teams, not 18, all of them based in the big cities. This meant that the new teams could be launched without disenfranchising any existing fans or bankrupting organisations that relied on Twenty20 as a major source of income. It also meant that almost all of the pros got a deal (and those that didn’t were red ball specialists in any case). So all the relaunch really did was improve the tournament’s marketing potential. In England there would be a lot more to lose. The prospect of not being able to cash in on T20 is really quite scary for the likes of Somerset, Sussex and Essex (see my AOC piece).

Then there is the TV rights situation and wrapped up with it cricket’s public standing. A lot of the Big Bash’s appeal can be put down to its prime time slot on a major free-to-air channel. This is unimaginable in Britain, a difference that can be attributed to the fact that Kerry Packer came along a decade or so before Rupert Murdoch branched out into broadcasting. None of the traditional terrestrial channels are risk takers and even if they were they wouldn’t be taking a risk on floodlit domestic cricket (remember that Channel Four stopped showing Tests in part because they disrupted their usual schedule, and that was during the daytime). There is no precedent that I can think of for anything significant that was exclusively on pay TV going back to terrestrial.

The effect of the absence of free cricket has been to damage cricket’s public standing which was probably never as high as it was in Australia in any case. If you ask the average man or woman on the street to name a cricketer I’d imagine one in ten at best would get any further than Pietersen and Flintoff. If cricket ever was our undisputed summer sport you can’t say that now. Football never stops in the eyes of many and cricket also has to compete with all sorts else. It is hopelessly optimistic to imagine that franchise cricket over here would transcend the sport as the Bash is reputed to do in Australia.

The weather is a factor too. This holds the Blast back more than just about anything else. Whilst an evening’s cricket at the end of a glorious Adelaide day looks extremely appealing night cricket in England is far less pleasant a lot of the time. Bad weather both puts people off from going and affects the quality of the pitches. The history of our competition suggests that it does best during a heatwave - the triumphant first running of the Twenty20 Cup coincided with one of the hottest spells on record and crowds were well up in 2013 when we had a hot summer. But we don’t get these every year and franchises can’t change that. The necessary return of a block of games could lead to wash-out seasons like 2012.

All in all the Big Bash model isn’t ideally suited to England. If our competition really was in crisis that wouldn’t matter so much and we would have nothing to lose by giving it a go. But though there are conundrums to be solved, in particular the inbalance in attendances across the north/south divide, all of the evidence suggests that the Blast actually does rather well. Over 700,000 people attended a Blast game last year, about 50,000 more than went to a Big Bash game in 2013/14. Not bad considering the issues discussed above and the fact that matches aren’t scheduled over the holiday season like they are in Australia. And these are not stereotypical newspaper carrying, bus pass wielding county traditionalists. Most of the people that fall into this category have made a point of boycotting T20, many of the people that frequent The Oval on a Friday night would never go to another type of county game.

Whilst the Bash works well in Australia the Blast has been designed with the English cricket supporter in mind. The idea that exporting the Australia model would revolutionise cricket in this country is hopelessly optimistic and in trying irreparable damage could be done to the counties that are the very fabric of the English game.