Former Australian captain Mark Taylor has spoken of the “unfixable” issue surrounding cricket’s future as Australia currently competes with India in five T20s.
The series started only four days after Australia won the ODI World Cup final with Marnus Labuschagne describing it as “astonishing”.
Australia has lost the opening two games with Steve Smith, Josh Inglis, Marcus Stoinis and Sean Abbott the World Cup squad members to play in both matches, while Glenn Maxwell and Adam Zampa made their returns for the second fixture.
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Taylor agreed their performances have been impacted by the World Cup.
“There’s no doubt a bit of a hangover over there, these five T20 matches against India certainly haven’t got the same importance I think from anyone’s point of view as the World Cup final did have only a week or so ago,” he said on 2GB’s Wide World of Sports radio.
The T20 series comes after Australia’s gruelling year which has included Test tours of India and England, the World Test Championship final, the ODI World Cup and two separate white-ball series against South Africa and India.
A number of Australians also played in the Major League Cricket competition, held in the USA.
Taylor believes there’s not much of a solution to a jam-packed schedule for cricketers in the modern era.
“I think it’s almost unfixable to be totally honest,” he said.
“There’s a lot of different people pulling the games different ways, there’s people … that want to see more Test cricket. Then you’ve got this new kid on the block (called) T20, you’ve got leagues springing up everywhere, not just the IPL or the Big Bash here in Australia, you’ve got American leagues, Saudi leagues, Carribean leagues, Pakistan leagues, there’s leagues that are going to spring up all the time and they’re very attractive to play.
“Then you’ve got a World Cup that only a few weeks ago everyone had written off as unimportant but all of a sudden once we were into it, thought ‘hey this is pretty good cricket’. So that’s the problem you have.
“You’ve got three formats of the game which allows you to have so much cricket but it means that at various times, series like this one we’re seeing with the T20 will be compromised because it isn’t the best playing the best.”