Is county cricket unfairly maligned?

County cricket gets a bit of stick. You may have noticed this. High volume, low standard, so the critics say. Full of medium-pace trundlers nipping it around on green pitches. Only watched by one man and his dog. Root cause of all England's ills when things are going badly, and borderline irrelevant when the national side enjoys success. A creaking institution that sits somewhere on the scale between punchline and punching bag.

In recent years it has been to blame for English mediocrity in the Test arena. Trevor Bayliss, who coached England to a first 50-over World Cup success last year, was pretty frank about their problems in the longer format. "I think there's a huge gap between county and international cricket," he said in an interview to mark the end of his four-year tenure.

"Again and again, we've picked the best players in the county game. And again and again, they've found the gap too large to bridge. Our top players come back from county cricket and they're not complimentary about the standard. They don't think it helps prepare them for international cricket."

He added that the pitches produced for County Championship matches were too "soft and damp", aiding traditional English seam-and-swing merchants and denying batsmen the opportunity to spend long hours in the middle. Faced with flatter Test pitches, those bowling strengths are then negated, while the extra pace deployed by opposition attacks comes as a "shock" to candidates for England's top order.

It is a fairly lengthy charge sheet, and full of familiar gripes - particularly if you've followed some of the many recurring debates in English cricket over the last few years: How are we going to replace Andrew Strauss (and then Alastair Cook)? Why haven't we produced a top-level Test batsman since Joe Root? Where are the genuine quicks who can help the team win overseas? Where are the spinners, full stop?

Even the ECB has bought into this line of thinking. Discussing the job of national selection - or "talent ID" in the current lingo - after his appointment as England's new performance director last year, Mo Bobat gave a brusque assessment of the domestic game. "County cricket itself isn't necessarily reflective of international cricket… the difference between pace bowling and spin bowling in international cricket and domestic cricket is stark."

County cricket isn't as good as international cricket - who would have thought it? Perhaps unsurprisingly, this isn't an entirely new thesis, either.

Back at the turn of the century, when England really did have a Test team worth grumbling about, Duncan Fletcher took over as head coach and quickly made his feelings known. Famously, Fletcher picked out Marcus Trescothick and Michael Vaughan as having the mettle for Tests, despite first-class averages in the low 30s, trusting his own judgement above the middling stats. Later he became fixated on out-and-out pace bowlers - the likes of Sajid Mahmood and Liam Plunkett - with slightly less success.

Fletcher had experienced the county circuit first hand with Glamorgan before being appointed by England, and he concluded that "a high level of intensity is missing too much of the time". Like Bayliss, he thought the experience for players was an unsatisfactory grind. "It is just play, travel, play, travel and so on. There is just no time to take one's game forward," he wrote in his autobiography, Behind the Shades.

But that brings us to the rub. Between the start of the Fletcher era and the end of the Bayliss one, England weren't too shabby. They dragged themselves up from the Test doldrums to be ranked, albeit briefly, No. 1 in the world; they were victorious in five Ashes series (compared to none in the preceding 18 years), and won in South Africa (twice) and India. They won a World T20 and a World Cup. In ODIs, they're current No. 1s and have genuinely never played the game better.

YeT soMeHoW cOuNty CRicKeT iS sTiLL rUbBisH.

Of course, some of this improvement is attributable - to the introduction of central contracts, for instance, or prioritising one format or another. Some would argue that a structural change in the county game initiated back near the start of Fletcher's tenure, splitting the County Championship into two divisions in 2000, contributed directly to raising standards and to England's apotheosis as a Test side under Andy Flower a decade later.

It is a complex ecosystem. To take the ODI example, England didn't just get good because in 2015 Strauss, by now the ECB's director of cricket, told them to. A greater focus on selection and approach helped, but in particular they had to put their faith in a crop of aggressive young batsmen forged by county white-ball competitions - players whose skills had in part been influenced by the fact England's List A tournament was 40 overs a side for several years, encouraging a more attacking mindset.

What looks like embroidery around the edges can be significant. The Kolpak ruling, for instance, allowed for an influx of South Africans looking to ply their trade - and arguably made the county circuit a tougher, more hard-bitten environment to develop in. More recently, the ECB tightened its criteria in this area, while Brexit looks set to remove it altogether (though each team will be allowed an extra overseas player instead).

On the flip side, financial incentives paid by the ECB to counties for fielding younger, England-qualified players served to push some older pros out of the game before they might otherwise have chosen to do so, with the result that valuable experience was lost.

Where that leaves the relative strength of county cricket as a breeding ground for Test cricketers - as against, say, the six-team Sheffield Shield or the 38-team Ranji Trophy - is hard to quantify. But maybe we should look beyond the English examples.

Take Chris Rogers, who spent more than a decade around the traps during northern summers. When his chance eventually came again with Australia, he knew his game well enough to carve out five Test hundreds after the age of 35. Or Marnus Labuschagne, whose county epiphany was close to instantaneous. Having arrived at Glamorgan for the start of the 2019 summer, he benefited from a technical tweak advised by coach Matthew Maynard and went on to plunder 1114 runs at 65.52 (in Division Two of the Championship, it should be noted). Fair to say he's gone pretty well since then.

Then there is the experience of Cheteshwar Pujara, who has come over for regular county stints since 2014. Although his aim was attuning to alien conditions as much as developing his game, and the returns have been modest by Labuschagnian standards - 988 runs at 29.93 for Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire - there was also a demonstrable benefit. Having averaged 22.20 on his first Test tour of England, he averaged 39.71, and scored a century in challenging circumstances in Southampton, on India's 2018 visit.

And while the days when Viv Richards or Richard Hadlee spent long summers in county whites have passed, a quick list of some of the top overseas (or Kolpak) performers from recent seasons - Kyle Abbott, Simon Harmer, Matt Henry, Labuschagne, Morne Morkel, Jeetan Patel, Kumar Sangakkara, Dane Vilas - suggests it's not all dibbly-dobbly rubbish.

Sure, things aren't perfect. Domestic first-class cricket is, sadly, not a sexy business, and there are measures that could be taken to improve the standard. You may have read on these pages my colleague George Dobell railing against a schedule that pushes large chunks of the Championship season into April and September - when conditions encourage seam bowling and marginalise spin. Prioritising the more profitable white-ball formats is bound to have a knock-on effect when it comes to producing Test cricketers.

The professional game in England (and Wales) could do far more to access talent in black, Asian and minority ethnic communities. It could expand its net well beyond the network of private schools and traditional clubs that has exerted an increasingly strong influence at the top level.

But neither is it doing too badly. As ESPNcricinfo's scorecard traffic demonstrates, the County Championship - or this year's Bob Willis Trophy - is still beloved of many thousands up and down the country. And while entertainment and quality are not necessarily interlinked, England might finally have struck upon a handful of apprentices who have what it takes: Rory Burns and Dom Sibley have emerged as function-over-form Test openers of promise, while Ollie Pope looks the brightest young thing since Root. Jofra Archer - Barbados-raised but given his chance at Sussex - Mark Wood and Olly Stone all do more than just trundle in.

(English spinners remain in need of some love. An experiment with giving visiting teams the option of bowling first - instead of conducting a toss - in order to encourage better pitches was quietly shelved this year. But that is really a whole other topic in itself.)

Controversial as it sounds, maybe Bayliss' main problem with the Test side came down to those small matters of selection and strategy? Either way, should Ashley Giles' professed attempts to reprioritise Tests bear fruit, you can bet the county game will barely warrant a mention. This would be a shame. Unfashionable it may be, but crap it ain't.