Reality cricket

It took less than a month in charge for Michael Vaughan to blame county cricket for all the ills of the England team. But, when he feels brave enough to examine the latest dispatch from Lord's, perhaps he might concede that the problem lies rather closer to home. For the schedule for England's 2004 season was released today, and it is every bit as terrifying as expected.

Never mind the daily grind of the County Championship. It will be a miracle if the core members of England's Test and one-day teams are still in one piece by September 25 next year - the uncommonly late finish to an exhausting seven months of non-stop internationals. That seven Tests and 28 one-day internationals have been scheduled for England's domestic season is knackering enough. For these matches to follow hot on the heels of a gruelling 11-international tour of the Caribbean, however, is masochistic in the extreme.

Midway through the 2002 season, England appeared to boast a stable of fast bowlers that would keep them in wickets for the next ten years. Fourteen months later, however, many of these thoroughbreds are only fit for glue. No fewer than eight first-choice seamers, from Andrew Caddick to Alex Tudor, via Matthew Hoggard and Simon Jones, have been ruled out this summer with injuries of one sort or another - and the body count is sure to rise this winter, in the thankless conditions of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka

It is a measure of the intensity of next season that a player in both the Test and the one-day teams, such as Andrew Flintoff, will be available for his county for a maximum of two matches in 2004. That means no opportunity to tinker with a damaged technique or rediscover some lost confidence in quieter surrounds. James Anderson, the Truman Burbank of English cricket, has already discovered this only too well.

Anderson has been compared to David Beckham several times already in his short career. But even Beckham, the greatest attention-grabber of our age, spends less of his life in the direct gaze of the public than cricketers. Ninety minutes of a football match, half-an-hour of press conferences, a couple of shopping sprees and a film premiere is not the same as spending six hours in the blazing sun, remembering not to pick your nose in case the world is watching.

The off-camera life isn't particularly compelling, either. Time spent away from loved ones is felt far more acutely in your hotel room than on the field. And then there's all that travelling - whether it's island-hopping, long-haul flights, or traffic jams on the M6. And what other sport tangles quite so messily with politics? It's a sure bet that when the players attempt to embark on a month's R and R at the end of next season, they'll find their peace ruined by the inevitable row that awaits them before their scheduled tour of Zimbabwe.

It is hardly original to make the plea that there is too much cricket being played. But the longer the objections of players and media alike are ignored, the more agitated the appeals become. It was the overkill of 2002-03, as intense a winter as any cricket team can have faced, that broke Nasser Hussain's spirit and drove Graham Thorpe into a late withdrawal for the sake of his family. What lies ahead will be every bit as strength-sapping.

It also has the makings of a typically farcical finale. Never before has a major tournament (if the ICC Champions' Trophy warrants that tag) been scheduled so late in the English season. The last time the ICC held their jamboree, in Sri Lanka's rainy season in September 2002, a two-day downpour wiped out the final (and the replay).What price a repeat performance?