Michael Vaughan questions England and Wales Cricket Board stance on Indian Premier League

London: England could be losing its fight to keep its players from the lucrative Indian Premier League.

Test captain Michael Vaughan added his voice to that of star batsman Kevin Pietersen on Tuesday and suggested it was inevitable that England's leading professionals will eventually join their international counterparts in the IPL.

The England and Wales Cricket Board has ordered centrally contracted players such as Vaughan, Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff to sit out the game's newest competition. The ECB is concerned about scheduling conflicts with the English season and what is seen as a shift in power away from cricket's traditional home and toward Asia.

But the Twenty20 tournament begins for the first time on Friday, with many of the world's leading players - including Ricky Ponting, Jacques Kallis and Shane Warne - in action.

And Vaughan thinks it's only a matter of time before England's players join in.

"I've seen a few of the previews over in India with the adverts and the billboards, and it looks like it is going to be a big event," Vaughan said. "If there are big grounds, and there is a lot of money involved, you're going to want to play in it.

"I think it will be sooner rather than later that we will see England players playing in the IPL."

Dimitri Mascarenhas is the only England player taking part in the inaugural season, but the one-day allrounder is not centrally contracted to the ECB, giving him greater leeway.

Rather than taking up his bat in the IPL, Vaughan is available for Yorkshire's season-opener against Leeds Bradford University Centre of Cricketing Excellence, which starts Wednesday.

Pietersen has called the ECB's decision to block its players "ridiculous," and Vaughan seemed as interested as any fan when he talked about the tournament on Tuesday.

"I've heard so many people say that all the best players are in the world are there, and you want to go and play in it," Vaughan told Sky TV. "I think we're all naive if we don't think that England players are going to end up playing in the IPL."

If England's players are to take part, the ECB could have to rethink its whole domestic setup because the English season begins in April.

The county championship has run since 1890 and has traditionally been seen as the heart of the English game, giving homegrown players an arena in which to hone their skills before elevation to the national team.

Several solutions have been mooted by commentators and the British press, such as a reformatted and rescheduled championship, a reduction in the number of competitions, or even a season break to allow a similar "English Premier League" in June or July.

"Maybe there will be a league set up in England, and with leagues set up elsewhere there could be something like the Champions League (in soccer) where the top few who win their leagues go and play," Vaughan said. "Certainly it is not a negative thing for the game. "It is exciting for the players, it is exciting for the supporters, so we should look forward to it."

As well as the players' enthusiasm, is the threat of an exodus from the national side if the ECB forces its stars to choose between the high wages and sponsorship of the ICL and test cricket.

"England can't afford to lose all their best players to the IPL, but the players have families to worry about, mortgages to pay, and futures to consider," the chairman of the England's Professional Cricketers' Association, Dougie Brown, said last week. "You can't blame them for looking at the chance of being able to earn twice as much in a month as they could do in a whole year and concluding, 'I want a piece of that."'

While the ECB wants to protect domestic cricket and the England side and the International Cricket Council is trying to preserve the prestige of five-day test cricket, TV companies are seeking to exploit the huge audience for the shorter form of the game - prompting the explosion in Twenty20 tournaments.

Vaughan is among those thinking that there must be a way of harnessing the excitement surrounding the Twenty20 game to the benefit of the sport as a whole.

"It's exciting for the game and we shouldn't look at it as being a threat - it is a really exciting time for the game with all these leagues," Vaughan said. "Exposure for cricket is being thrown out to the world and everyone is talking about it."