Michael Vaughan urges ECB to consider scrapping overseas players to save money during coronavirus crisis

Former England captain Michael Vaughan has called for a halt to overseas players in the County Championship for the next two seasons in a bid to cut costs.

A financial report on Monday suggested the impact of the coronavirus pandemic could be as much as £85million to the county game.

And Vaughan suggested allowing overseas players in the one-day game only and not in four-day cricket as a temporary solution to cut costs.

He told the BBC: “You have to look at every area where you can save a few quid. Traditionalists will go mad but these are unprecedented times. In the next two years, could you look at not having overseas players for the four-day game?”

Already the first nine rounds of County Championship games have been axed with cricket not set to resume until July 1 at the earliest. And Vaughan suggested another cost-cutting measure would be to cut Championship games next season as well.

“I’m a die-heard four-day and five-day player,” he said. “But four-day cricket costs the game. It is a cost to the game that could, just for a couple of years, be worth reducing.

“If you reduced them from 14 to 10 games, you’d miss the games but I don’t think it would be a huge problem for a couple of years. You could go back to that in two or three years.”

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