Seismic is an inadequate description. City-based 20-over cricket in India is set to have more impact on the English game than a mere earthquake.

From the dawn of cricket as a professional sport in the 18th century until last Wednesday, cricketers who wanted to make a living out of the game played in England. In Mumbai, at the auction of players for the Indian Premier League, that changed. India is where the money is: India is the place for cricketers to make big, fast bucks, because their administrators are giving their market what it wants.

Some of the financial figures being bandied are not quite so lucrative as they seem, as a lot of the deals are ‘back-ended’ and the profits will be made by the eight city-based franchises towards the end of their 10-year contracts with IPL. But the players’ salaries are real enough.

Kumar Sangakkara has only to show up in the northern city of Mohali for a few weeks over the next three years to earn $2.1 million, ever so slightly more than what Warwickshire paid him last season, and that excludes prize money and bonuses.

It is only a question of time — and a few days at that — before English cricketers join the IPL and miss the start of the coming county season. England’s top 12 players are on central contracts so they won’t be going anywhere except New Zealand in the next few weeks. But that leaves several marketable players who are currently being tempted by offers.

Speculation this weekend centres primarily on 30-year-old Dimitri Mascarenhas. The IPL wants allrounders with some star quality to help with the franchises’ off-field promotions. Mascarenhas, with earrings and the kudos of having hit five consecutive sixes against India in England’s one-day series last autumn, has that marketability — and some of the franchises have yet to fill their quota of eight overseas players per squad. Each franchise has to spend $3.3m on players’ annual salaries, with a maximum of $5m.

Ligertwood, Mascarenhas’s agent, is non-commital about whether his client will join. “I feel sorry they (England’s contracted players) have missed the boat this year. Some of them could have gone for a million bucks. I talked to Kevin Pietersen’s agent but it was just too difficult for KP. I’m sure the IPL would find a way in... but they would have to pay a fair bit. ”

The question is what the reaction of English counties will be when (not if) some of their players — not the centrally contracted 12 — sign for the IPL. There is simply no precedent for a county player going off to play somewhere else during the county season: it is only recently that the economies of the East have boomed.

Hampshire could go so far as to cancel Mascarenhas’s contract if he breaks it by playing in the IPL — and there would be a lot of pressure on them from other counties to do so, as chief executives seek to hang on to their players.

But Mascarenhas could point to his Hampshire captain, Shane Warne, who has already decided to play in the IPL and miss the first part of the county season, and argue that he deserves nothing worse than a pro-rata reduction in his Hampshire pay and a slap over the knuckles.