SYDNEY - Australian cricket bosses want to cut the number of international fixtures to ease the heavy workload for players, reports said Friday.
Five players have been forced to return home with injuries from Australia’s ongoing seven-match one-day series in India amid criticisms of an over-congested international calendar.
Australia’s programme this year included 40 one-day games, 13 Tests and the World Twenty20 Championship and the strain is showing on the players.
The Australian newspaper said 31 cricketers had represented Australia in the one-day team this calendar year and by the end of the Indian series that number could have risen to 35, with only 25 players listed on central playing contracts.
Cricket Australia chairman Jack Clarke said there was a push to reduce the amount of cricket in the International Cricket Council’s next Future Tours Programme, which comes into effect when the present arrangement ends after 2012.
“It is not fixed yet as to what’s going to happen, that’s been one of the hold-ups in releasing the FTP, the ICC events,” Clarke told The Australian.
“The type of events and the regularity is one of the things.
“I suspect the game can’t support an ICC tournament every year,” he said.
“So hopefully less will be more, and I’d be surprised if there’s an ICC event every year, going forward in 2013-2020,” he added.
The newspaper said the “increasingly irrelevant” ICC Champions Trophy seems to be the weakest link and may be scrubbed from the schedule or be moved to a four-year rotation, instead of the current two
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