Pakistan to operate squad rotation

We said that squad rotation was inevitable and Pakistan will be the first to practice it under that name. Australia frequently rest players during one-day series and Brian Lara recently stated that West Indies players would be rested in the unlikely event that they took an impregnable lead in a series. Here's Jagadish's view on that.

Pakistan are going the whole hog, though. Inzamam said: "We have 75 playing days before the World Cup and the danger of losing some of our players to fatigue and fitness problems is real. This is why we have decided to adopt a rotation policy to preserve our players for next year's big tournament."

We're not too pleased about this. It's one thing to give players international experience when you're in a position of strength, but the subtext of this is that there is too much cricket for any one player to appear in all of their nation's matches. International cricket and Test cricket in particular is meant to be the best against the best. A Test match is a big deal. When we were young, it used to feel like years between matches and each was a massive event. These days they're more common than the foggy feeling we experience when we haven't yet had coffee of a morning.

Just about everybody thinks there's too much international cricket, but we're all funding the game by watching the TV or whatever. We're not likely to stop, so there doesn't really look to be an end to this. It's a shame because the quality of the game will suffer and we'll be left with a substandard 'product'. We don't like calling cricket a product, but that's the sentiment that's causing this.

We call on supporters the world over to boycott all of the rubbish and unnecessary series, starting with the Champions' Trophy, which is likely to feature approximately zero 'champions' after squad rotation's done its work.

Note: Our deep-rooted hypocrisy dictates that we will still cover the Champions' Trophy. We'll cover it in an 'Under-19 World Cup' kind of a way though, not an 'Ashes' kind of way. That'll teach it.