We want less

Cricket, like the food in British supermarkets, has lost a lot of its seasonality. It rolls on remorselessly, year-round, and doesn't care if it loses flavour as a result. There are still certain fixed points in the calendar, giving shape to the year, like the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne. But even things that come round annually aren't always cheering. Early February has taken on a particular character: it's when lovers of one-day cricket lose the will to watch.

The reason is the qualifying stage of the tri-nation tournament in Australia. This is one of sport's great idiocies. You have three teams, and you need to reduce them to two. So you stage 12 matches! In six cities! Over nearly four weeks! And you expect people to stay awake!

Back in 1990-91, I covered one of these tournaments. I had been a cricket correspondent for a year and it was the first time I had found the game uninspiring. The itinerary had been designed to sap all energy and enthusiasm. I remember writing that the tournament was making geometric history, since it was both triangular and one-sided. That feat has been repeated many times since, and most of all now. Australia lord it in their own backyard to a ludicrous degree. The other teams are like a couple of small boys who get asked round to a bigger kid's house purely so he can trounce them at Call of Duty 3.

The Aussies can't help being good, but they could stop organising so many matches. Brevity is the soul of one-day cricket. Staging each fixture four times defeats the point. As it happens, the present series has stayed alive right through to today's final qualifier - depending on your definition of alive. And England have done their best to make it compelling, in a macabre way, by finding new depths to plumb. But that doesn't mean the tournament is the right length.

Not that Cricket Australia is the only culprit. The 2003 World Cup was way too long, sprawling to 54 matches. This time, our friends at ICC have learnt their lesson and cut it back - to 51 matches. In terms of time, it has somehow got longer, expanding from 43 days to 47. Even Fifa, which is not noted for underdoing things, manages to get a World Cup finished inside a month.

English fans used to be able to be "a little bit superior", as we are described in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll, about one-day scheduling. Not any more: this year England will host their first seven-match home series against a single opponent, India. This is part of a reciprocal arrangement hammered out by two boards who always disagree about scheduling. England played seven one-dayers in India last year, so the same must happen here. The fact that the series in India was the dullest piece of popular entertainment since the second Star Wars trilogy is neither here nor there. And yes, I know England were rubbish in that series, but the itinerary - a breakneck spin around some of the subcontinent's more obscure venues - was stupid, verging on sadistic.

With the World Cup only five weeks away, Test cricket has now taken a break. But one-day international cricket hasn't. South Africa v Pakistan dribbles on till February 14; India v Sri Lanka till February 17. At the end of the month, Bangladesh, Bermuda and Canada will be cooking up a little World Cup appetiser, consisting of three games that count as official one-dayers.

No sooner will Australia have lifted the Commonwealth Bank trophy, than they have to jump on a plane to Wellington to play another three matches against their mate Lou Vincent and the rest of the Black Caps. Even Mr Cricket himself, Mike Hussey, may struggle to care about that one. The two teams will be playing for the Chappell-Hadlee Trophy. What was meant as a tribute to two great cricket families ends up as a bit of an embarrassment.

How did the short form of the game get so long-winded? It's partly Kerry Packer's fault, for abruptly expanding our idea of how long a series could be. It's partly the administrators' fault, for being greedy and blinkered and working the players to the bone. It's partly the television companies' fault, for not seeing that less would be more. But mainly it's our fault, for watching.

This is a public service announcement. You may find a cricket match on your television screen that is not very interesting. Do adjust your set. Press the off button. The good of the game depends on it.