RE: English cricket needs to wake up and face some cold, hard facts following the Adil Rashid debacle
It wouldn't surprise me if the likes of India, Australia and England flex their muscles and look to influence the international schedule to benefit their domestic franchises by allowing more high quality players including their own test players to compete.
The other problem we have with Test match cricket is that it's just not throwing up enough good quality matches or series at the moment. Sri Lanka's recent series with South Africa, Indian and Pakistan thrashing Ireland and Afghanistan - these aren't great adverts for the game. Even for England, in the past 12 months I can think of only 2 tightly contested Test matches we've played. The 2nd Test against WI where they beat us and the final Test against New Zealand which was a drawn match with us trying to bowl them out on the final day. All the other games we've played have been pretty one-sided whether they were defeats or victories.
And I think part of that is the fact the with so such regularity of series between the "Big 4" of Australia, England, India and Sth Africa that the others are suffering from a lack of high end competition. If your B and C list sides get more opportunities to play against your A list teams then they will continue to improve giving everyone better contests in the long term.
The ICC should be mandating that the Big 4 at the very least send A teams to tour associate nations as well as host them for significant tours where they play against several domestic 1st Class teams. Of course this would all mean investing in the worldwide expansion at grassroots level, but nobody wants to spend the money.