Top players will burn out, says Bayliss
While England look on powerlessly, Australia will contest the T20 tri-series final against New Zealand on the postage stamp that is Eden Park.
Yet, simultaneously, Australia’s test team are in South Africa, practising for the four-test series there, so their national side are playing in two places at once.
What better illustration of how over-stretched international cricketers are, how devalued tournaments are, and how defrauded spectators have become?
During the T20 revolution of the past decade, the world of professional cricket has grown almost as fast as the universe since the Big Bang - and nobody has any firm idea of where the sport is heading.
The nearest that the International Cricket Council and the national governing bodies appear to have to a vision is the desire for ever more cricket and ever bigger contracts with broadcasters and sponsors.
On the field, cricket is becoming an ever-faster merry-go-round where everybody is playing, all the time, for anyone.
Saddled with the job of preserving a semblance of order amid this chaos is Trevor Bayliss. Aside from the results, none of England’s cricketers had a nervous breakdown this winter, as several did on their two previous losing tours of Australia. This in itself rates a pass mark.
And how many days off has Bayliss had since England landed in Australia in late October? It is a nice round figure which he communicates by putting his thumb and index finger together to form a circle. In nearly four months, he has had two nights at home in Sydney, he admits, but was back to work next morning.
England have been on longer tours than the current one of five months and a week, like 1954-55 when they spent six months in Australia and New Zealand. But there was only one format, and far less intense scrutiny.
Bleary-eyed and unshaven after the late-night T20 win against New Zealand on Sunday that was to no avail, yet still calm and affable, Bayliss did another press conference as part of the usual postseries routine - and to explain his stance that T20 internationals should be scrapped except in the build-up to World T20 finals.
But England’s head coach went further by warning that players like Adil Rashid are being forced by the game’s administrators to choose between red-ball and whiteball cricket, and that the finest cricketers will be able to play all three formats for ‘‘only three or four years’’ before burning out.
Getting rid of T20 internationals, Bayliss reiterated, ‘‘is my personal opinion. I am not the only one either, other guys talk about it as well. It is a difficult one.
‘‘The way we are heading you are almost forcing players to make a decision as Rashid did to go one way or the other. There is so much cricket.
‘‘If you play every form of the game - we have a few guys who do that - there is no way you can play every game. Your career would be three or four years long and that would be it.’’
Bayliss, by the terms of his England and Wales Cricket Board contract, has to be diplomatic, so read between the lines when he is asked if there is too much cricket.
My reaction to Bayliss's specific point about T20 internationals is that England should continue to play them, but they should not be part of a long-winded tri-series, just a couple of slap-and-tickle games tacked on after a one-day series, staged in one weekend. They are meant to be meaningless.
As to his general point - his implication that the schedule is overloaded to the detriment of England's players, and coaches, and will force drastic changes with unforeseen consequences - Bayliss is incontrovertibly right.
❚ Telegraph Group