AFTER a stunning Ashes summer, cricket – or at least the top part of it – is in line for a bonanza.

Players like Freddie Flintoff and Kevin Pietersen, both national heroes with mass appeal, are set to earn millions of pounds from commercial tie-ins.

In fact, all the Ashes squad, including Kent keeper Geraint Jones, stand to make a lot of money from being part of such unexpected success.

About time too. Cricket has struggled to earn the sort of money enjoyed by football and footballers.

Kent County Cricket Club, like other counties, finds it challenging to make ends meet. Poor crowds at county matches, partly because few people have four days to spare to watch cricket, do little for the bottom line.

At least the crash-bang Twenty20 format pulls in bigger crowds and more revenue.

The desperate need for more investment in cricket forced the ECB to take Sky cash rather than settle for millions less through a combined deal with Sky and Channel 4.

ECB officials have come in for a lot of stick for this decision. But they had no alternative. What they did wrong was to mess up the timing. They should have waited until after the Ashes series and then they could have extracted a much better deal.

Even cricket-hating BBC Television might have put in a bid.

It was rich of the Beeb (Test Match Special is excluded from this criticism) to snipe at the ECB for its telly decision when it did not offer a penny piece for cricket. Yet Auntie was happy to spend a huge amount of licence fee on football rights.

It was also a mistake of the ECB not to protect Test matches as a "crown jewel" event that must be shown on terrestrial TV – people who do not subscribe to Sky will not be able to see live cricket from next year.

Despite a welcome injection of extra cash, cricket is unlikely to attract the obscene riches characterising the top echelons of football.

That’s a good thing. Excessive money has encouraged greed among players and their agents and has diminished the hunger for success.

Clubs relied on ever-increasing gate receipts to pay for crazy salaries to, mostly, journeymen footballers.

But the recent slump in spectators shows that ordinary fans have had enough of exhorbitant ticket prices. Hopefully, it will remind clubs and players that the cash cow has had enough and it’s time to get the finances into a more sensible shape.

Cricket lovers will hope that well-deserved rewards for Freddie, KP, Vaughan, Jones and the rest will not diminish their determination to carry on winning.