ECB chairman Richard Thompson has said that his board will think "very carefully" before granting English players No-Objection Certificates (NOCs) to play in the proposed Afghanistan Premier League T20 (APL), though the league itself remains in some doubt.
Cricinfo revealed last week that the ECB planned to grant NOCs for the APL despite its refusal to play Afghanistan in bilateral series due to the Taliban government's treatment of women.
The story prompted significant backlash, with Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi - who led calls for England to boycott a fixture against Afghanistan at last year's Champions Trophy - encouraging players to "think seriously about the consequences" of signing up for the league.
Thompson appeared to partially row back on the ECB's stance when speaking at an event at Lord's this week, though he suggested the board are wary of restricting players' movements unlawfully.
"At the end of the day, our laws are very clear over restraint of trade," Thompson said, when asked about the ECB's general approach to granting NOCs. "You can't restrain somebody from working somewhere unless you've got good reason."
Asked specifically about granting NOCs for the APL, he said: "That's a whole other issue, and that hasn't come to us yet. But when it does, we will have to consider that very carefully."
The APL has announced the registrations of a dozen England-qualified players for this month's draft, with Will Smeed, James Rew, Asa Tribe and Dawid Malan's names added to the longlist in the past week. The draft was recently postponed to October 24, with the league due to run from December 27 to January 16.
However, Cricinfo understands that there is still some distance to go before the league takes place as intended. Only three out of five franchise owners have been announced, with limited details in the public domain, and the process of finding buyers for the final two is understood to have taken longer than organisers had hoped.
One source, speaking on condition of anonymity, described the league's prospects as "touch and go" and said that the main obstacle was finding franchise buyers ahead of the tournament.
Mark Butcher, the former England batter, encouraged the ECB to give players clear guidance on their potential participation and said that the lack of clarity owed primarily to the ICC's failure to uphold its own standards on Afghanistan.
"The thing that always bothers me most about any conversation around Afghanistan cricket… is that as Full Members, they breach the ICC's own criteria for qualification for that status, simply by not having a women's team [and] not having any sort of equality across men's and women's sport," Butcher told the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast.
He added: "If the ICC themselves, and then potentially the ECB in granting NOCs to their players going, as well as agreeing to play Afghanistan in international cricket, although not in bilateral cricket… is happy for that to happen, then it's a difficult moral argument to turn around to your players and say, 'Well, we've given you an NOC, but now we don't really want you to go.'
"You either don't want them to go or you're happy for them to go… You can put it on the individual players if you want, but I would tend to put it on the game at large, or at least the ruling parties who operate at a double standard which is quite breathtaking around the whole issue."