Players bouncing between India and home

THAT gurgling you can hear in the background might be the sound of the strangling of the goose that laid the golden egg.

The danger of a surfeit of cricket is now acutely apparent. In fact, the danger has been acutely apparent for some time, and is now being quantified, costed, and added to.

Seemingly every other day in India, an Australian player comes to grief. Moises Henriques is the latest, laid low by a hamstring strain, severe enough for him to come home. It is only slightly far-fetched to say that there is a more recognisable Australian team in transit and in convalescence than in India. When Burt Cockley joins the party today, it will not be far-fetched at all.

It will still be news to some, distracted by the spring carnival, that Henriques is in India anyway. He replaced James Hopes. It will be news to some that Hopes ever was in India, and that Tim Paine was (and that Tim Paine plays cricket for Australia), and that Adam Voges still is (at the time of going to press), and that Andrew McDonald soon will be. It will not be news to anyone that Brad Hodge wasn't, isn't and won't be in India. Mostly, he's just in.

It might be news to Peter Siddle's family that he was in India; they've been looking for him. Siddle was out of the country playing cricket for almost six months until Thursday, and it would have been longer except that he suffered - you guessed it - an injury. If he had stayed away another week, it would have been called a community service order. The odd thing was that he was reported to have come home from India early!

It will be, if not strictly news, a matter of only dim consciousness to some that Australia is in India at all, and why, and for how long, and how availingly, other than the new verity that it is always probable that Australia is playing India in some form of the game at the moment, and that lots of Australian cricketers are likely to be in India at any one time. It is called programming by the ICC.

Henriques was in India in the first instance to play in and help win the Champions League, not to be confused with the Premier League or the Champions Trophy. For distinction's sake, the Premier League is an Indian tournament played in South Africa. The Champions Trophy is a Pakistani tournament played in South Africa.

In the Champions League, Henriques was playing for NSW, not to be confused with Australia, although that would be forgivable. Last week, Fairfax Sydney colleague Will Swanton suggested that the best Australian side to win back the Ashes next year is NSW. We thought he was joking until Cockley took 1-106 against WA and that night was picked for Australia, and Hodge made 195 and 114 not out and wasn't.

Detained by their Champions League engagements with NSW, Henriques, Brett Lee, Nathan Hauritz and Doug Bollinger did not link up with the other NSW, captained by Ricky Ponting (guest appearance) and wearing green-and-gold (the away strip) until midnight before its first game.

This frustrated NSW (2) coach Tim Nielsen, who said in terms of planning and preparation, it left his team on a bit of a sticky wicket and just wasn't cricket. But Nielsen was well-beaten in the now-famous cliche competition by Shaun Marsh. Then Lee got injured and went home.

Then Henriques did. Not to mention Siddle, and Hopes, and Paine, and Haddin, and Bracken, and Ferguson, and Clarke, 12th man to be named.

Still, administrators dither. Presently, the International Cricket Council is mulling over the Future Tours Program, 2013-2020. A draft is due out in 2015.

The players are hopelessly conflicted. Their union says there is too much cricket, and they are feeling the pinch. But they want the spoils on offer in the IPL, which means catching the IPL's eye, which means gaining recognition by playing well for your country, which means playing all the time for everyone, which means running the risk of injury, until you are certain of such a lucrative living from the IPL and its spin-offs that you don't have to play for your country any more, nor for anyone else. Like Andrew Symonds and Andrew Flintoff.

The focus is on player burn-out, but ignores a parallel effect that in the long term may hurt the game more: fan burn-out. ''Spectator fatigue,'' it was called by Adam Gilchrist. Thursday night's stunner in Hyderabad, far from disprove the thesis, adds to it. Though replete with entertainment, the chances are that few were watching - why this one, rather than the last or the next? - and that it will soon be lost to memory in the rush of more matches. That's the pity.

When so many cricketers are playing for so many different teams in so many different forms of the game and so many tournaments, so often, and when there is always someone coming and always someone going, and always someone sitting in the pavilion, it becomes harder to care much about any one player, or any one team, or for that matter, about the game sometimes. Cricket might find that fans, like players, grow weary, and sore, and go home.

And it was such a lovely goose …