LONDON, July 16: The International Cricket Council has rejected calls to cut the number of Test and one-day matches between now and 2007.

After a crisis meeting at Lords, attended by the captains of the Test playing countries, the chief executive of the ICC, Malcolm Speed, said no changes would be made to the calendar.

“We presented a paper about the Tests and one-day internationals,” said Speed. “I do not anticipate cuts to the programme.”

New Zealand captain Stephen Fleming warned on Monday that a massive shake-up of international cricket was needed to avoid widespread player burn-out.

Fleming insisted that the overflowing number of fixtures was leading to increasing injuries and threatening the careers of leading players.

“We raised concerns about the amount of time between games,” Fleming said. “If the volume of cricket is going to remain at this level a bit more care must be taken with scheduling.

“It’s not so much the Test matches I am concerned about, it is more the one-dayers and the need to put out as many as possible. It places too much demand et that is being played.”

The captains who attended the meeting were Waqar Younis (Pak), S Carlisle (Zim), S Fleming (NZ), S Ganguly (Ind), N Hussain (Eng), S Jayasuriya (SrL), K Mashud (Ban), and S Pollock (SA).

Speed did agree to look at the possibility of reducing the number of fixtures with each country playing “no more than 14 Test matchs and 25 one-day internationals”.

Fleming was joined by England’s Nasser Hussain, Indian captain Sourav Ganguly and South African skipper Shaun Pollock among others.

Despite reservations about the current number of games, Fleming was quick to praise the ICC for their measures in fighting match fixing in the sport.

He continued: “We’re happy with what’s been put in place. We all know the game was at crisis point but, in the last 12 months, there has been a definite shift that affected us in many ways”.—PPI