Fortunately he won’t be playing for Leicestershire for very long!

Yes, we saw that. It’s really just a measure of how Buttler and the England squad really have made their feelings known about that series.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2022/nov/24/jos-buttler-not-fussed-by-a-series-defeat-take-that-as-a-red-flag-on-fixture-overkill

His might have been loitering in a subeditor’s inbox for a few days of course, so I’m not suggesting anything untoward.

You could remove the 12 ODIs that weren’t part of the Super League but I don’t think you can remove any others without trivialising the World Cup. Most international players don’t play domestic 50 over games so asking them to rock up to a tournament every 4 years with minimal preparation seems a sure way to devalue that tournament.

Re seeding. Daisy re-seeded our front lawn a few weeks ago – ignoring expert gardeners’ advice that replacement turf would be needed. The resulting green mop-top is a joy to behold. But by dint of me making that pun, the relevance of this thread is receding.

I read “teenage leg-spinner from Leicestershire” to the tune of “Long-haired lover from Liverpool”.

There, now you all have to deal with that in your heads as well….

Re seeding – you don’t need to have a set-up in which non-seeds play a preliminary round for seedings to make sense; there’s still value in seedings in a group-based competition so that each group of four contains eg one top seeded team and one moderate seed. As you say, the seedings can be made in lots of ways – even if it’s based on performance outside global tournaments, there’d be a significant difference between seeding points being allocated only for matches that form part of an ICC global calendar (which may limit official matches between two sides to one home and away series during a multi-year cycle, with any additional fixtures being regarded as “friendlies” for World Cup purposes), versus teams playing whoever they like as many times as they like and basing the seedings solely on the ICC rankings that result. For teams with lower rankings, results from bilateral or triangular series might also impact at what stage of the qualifying process they come in – previous competition results being less useful guides for the qualifying structure than for the main tournament itself. Though that would be more of an issue for eg Ireland or Netherlands than for England, decisions taken by the ICC about guaranteeing those sides a certain amount of cricket against ‘bigger’ cricketing countries might be another source of pressure on England’s fixture list.

Our world is shaped by what’s easiest to measure.

If I truly believed that this is simply schedule overcrowding while international cricket plays catch-up with its broadcasting commitments post Covid, I could park this lunacy in the “one-off, shouldn’t happen again” part of my brain.

Unfortunately it appears to be part of a clear trend that started before Covid and is in danger of being a golden-goose-slaying trend, as Bert suggests.

The sensible answer is surely to have fewer meaningless bilateral series of white ball cricket. To that end, the idea of major tournaments having early rounds for unseeded teams, the winners of which join the seeded ones makes sense. If seedlings for major tournaments were done purely on past performance in major tournaments, the requirement for bilateral series “for seeding purposes” goes away.

Broadcasters and cricket administrations tend to be measured on size, making “more” an imperative in their planning. More games, more staff, more money. The factors that really matter are hard or even impossible to measure – more genuine interest, more meaningful participation, more passion for the game. Wise stewardship of things that really matter is hard to find in all walks of life – cricket in that sense is no different.