Kevin Pietersen has criticised the current standard of the County Championship and proposed a Hundred-style restructuring in the wake of England 's disappointing Ashes campaign.
England lost the series inside 12 days, with Australia taking an unassailable 3-0 lead with an innings victory in the Boxing Day Test.
Pietersen believes that county cricket is to blame for England's recent failings at Test level, claiming the standard has fallen sharply since he first started playing.
"When I first started playing first-class cricket in England, the intensity of a County Championship match was like a Test match," Pietersen wrote in his Betway column.
"It was as tough as anything. I learned my trade against some of the greatest players in the world every week.
"When I made 355* against Leicestershire in 2015, I would have made 250 without pads on. It was a moment when I realised just how far county cricket had fallen.
"With the money elsewhere in the game, the Championship in its current form is not fit to serve the Test team.
"The best players don’t want to play in it, so young English players aren’t learning from other greats like I did.
"Batters are being dismissed by average bowlers on poor wickets and the whole thing is spiralling."
Pietersen went on to propose a radical overhaul of the current structure, similar to The Hundred.
"They now need to introduce a similar franchise competition for red-ball cricket, whereby the best play against the best every single week," he added.
"They would make money available to attract some of the best overseas players in the world and the top English players would benefit from playing alongside them.
"It would be a marketable, exciting competition, which would drive improvement in the standard and get people back through the gates for long-form cricket.
"I see it as an eight-team round-robin league in the middle of the summer.
"The county system doesn’t necessarily need to change. It can be the feeder system below this competition, where players are developed until they’re ready to step up.
"I can promise you that the current England team and lots of the best youngsters in the system still see Test cricket, in particular Ashes cricket, as the pinnacle.
"But the world’s best players are involved in the IPL, the PSL, the Big Bash, The Hundred, and so on, so it’s no good denying them the chance to make their millions anymore, as I was back in the day.
"We need to produce lucrative, high-quality, interesting competitions that reward and improve the best players. This could be one."
