This week has seen the start of the domestic Twenty20 cup. Into its sixth year, the competition is wide open with many teams fancying their chances of success. Kent, Durham and Somerset are the favourites, with the latter likely to be greatly assisted by the presence of Marcus Trescothick.

If there is a player more suited to this form of the game - I'd like to see him. Plus, he isn't going to be called away on international duty either is he? Trescothick is a man that England's one day team misses a great deal and I expect him to be up there in the leading run-scorers. They also have Ian Blackwell in their ranks, who can take a game away from you with some destructive batting. He's a man who deals in boundaries - mainly because running quick singles isn't exactly his forte - but nevertheless, he is dangerous.

Something else in Somerset's favour is their captain - Justin Langer. He has a good cricketing brain and like Trescothick, he no longer represents his country so will be available for the whole tournament. For the Trescothick, Blackwell and Langer factors, if I was to bet on the Twenty20 cup, I would favour the Somerset Sabres.

This kind of talk has played second fiddle though. For it is the confirmation that England will play five winner-takes-all £10m Twenty20 matches in the Caribbean after the ECB signed a deal with Sir Allen Stanford that has dominated all cricket discussion. The first game takes place on the 1^st November, with the winning players receiving £500,000 each for their troubles. A staggering amount of money for playing in 40 overs of cricket isn't it?

It is set to become the richest team prize for a sporting event, with the winning players set to earn £7.5m more between them than the Manchester United players did after winning the Champions League last month. That's a statistic which has resulted in many people referring back to the old adage - 'it's just not cricket'.

There is no doubt that this agreement isn't cricket as we know it and will certainly have many worried about the future of the game. Watching the press conference which explained the situation left me with mixed feelings. Seeing the likes of Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Garfield Sobers promote it made me think that it must be good for the game. These are cricketing legends who presumably value the state of the sport as a whole.

So, mid-way through the conference - I was on board. It will be exciting, it puts money into the game and it's only once a year I thought....but then came a moment which left me feeling extremely concerned.

What was it? Well, Sir Allen Stanford, the man behind the idea, the man that could help shape the future of cricket, said that he found test cricket 'boring'. Oh dear. Just in case he hadn't upset all the purists already - he went and stuck the knife in. He believes the future of cricket is Twenty20.

I personally hope that this is not the case. It is all about test cricket for me. I love it. Everything that is good about cricket is based around the five-day game. Everyone that starts playing cricket does so with the ambition of one day playing a test match for England. In the future I would be saddened if a young cricket talent said that his dream was to 'smack a quick 50 for England in a Twenty20 game and earn lots of money doing so'.

These Stanford Twenty20 games are not even given official status by the ICC, so they are all about the money. The players must be licking their lips at the prospect of, but I would hope that scoring a test century for their country should feel as good as earning £500,000 in a meaningless slog-fest once a year. Maybe I'm just being naive - I don't know.

For now though, it is time to focus on the domestic Twenty20 game that will be taking place over the next few weeks. I get the feeling that quite a few more players will be keen on performing well during this period. Can't think why though.