The calendar is full. Something has to give.

Every year another competition appears and nothing is removed. This is not a complaint about any one tournament — it is an observation that the sum has exceeded what the people playing can physically deliver.

Players are the constraint

Squads can be rotated, but the players audiences actually want to watch are a small group, and they are the ones being asked to play everything.

A leading international cricketer can face bilateral series across three formats, a domestic franchise league, one or two overseas franchise leagues, and a global tournament inside twelve months. There is no version of that schedule that includes a genuine off-season, and no amount of sports science makes a body indifferent to it.

Injury lists are the visible symptom of an invisible scheduling decision. When a fast bowler breaks down, the conversation is about his workload management. It should be about the fixture list that made the workload necessary.

Leagues are not the villain

It is fashionable to blame franchise cricket for this. That is lazy, and it is usually argued by people who would not accept the same reasoning applied to their own earnings.

Franchise leagues pay players properly, often several times what a board contract offers, and they have created viable careers for hundreds of cricketers who would otherwise have had none. A domestic player who never plays international cricket can now earn a living from the game. That is an unambiguous good, and anyone proposing to reduce it should be honest about who pays the cost.

The problem is not their existence. It is that nothing was cut to make room for them.

The uncomfortable conclusion

Somebody has to schedule less.

The obvious candidate is the bilateral series with no context and no consequence — a three-match one-day series in a dead window that neither side will remember in a year and neither set of supporters particularly wanted.

It is also the hardest thing to remove, because it is somebody’s guaranteed broadcast revenue. Boards without a lucrative domestic league depend on exactly that money to fund everything else they do: age-group cricket, women’s cricket, facilities, salaries. Telling a smaller board to play less is telling it to earn less, and there is currently no mechanism to compensate.

Why nobody fixes it

Because the fix requires collective action from parties with directly opposed interests.

The wealthiest boards benefit from the current arrangement. The smaller boards cannot afford to unilaterally play less. The leagues have no incentive to shrink. The players have the most to lose from the status quo and the least power to change it, and any individual who opts out is replaced.

Every actor is behaving rationally. The aggregate outcome is a calendar that injures the people it depends on.

What would actually work

• Central scheduling with protected rest windows — a genuine off-season that no competition may enter.
• Revenue distribution that does not force smaller boards to manufacture fixtures to survive.
• Workload limits with teeth, enforced at the sport level rather than negotiated per player.
• Fewer, more meaningful bilateral series, with context attached to each.

All of these require the wealthiest boards to give something up, which is why none of them has happened. It will take a serious enough crisis — a generation of injured fast bowlers, or a marquee tournament diminished by absences — before the incentives change.

This is an opinion piece and reflects the view of the author.