No more sport for sport's sake?

Derek Pringle deplores the decision to strip university matches of first-class status from the next season. He fears bright cricketers will henceforth almost surely choose college over county club. He argues in the Telegraph that the contribution of the universities to cricket is being under-estimated:

Nasser Hussain, John Crawley, Ed Smith, Jason Gallian, James Dalrymple, Andrew Strauss, James Foster, Jeremy Snape, Alex Loudon and Monty Panesar all played for their country after benefiting from a university education on and off the field. How many counties can claim as many England cricketers in the last 20 years? Not many.