Former England coach David Lloyd has warned that "alarm bells should be ringing" about the expanded Indian Premier League.
The new IPL season is due to begin later this month and there will be two new franchises taking part, Lucknow Supergiants and Gujarat Titans. As a result, an extra 14 matches will be played at the tournament, which will last more than two months.
It has already been confirmed that South Africa will be without Kagiso Rabada, Aiden Markram, Rassie van der Dussen, Lungi Ngidi and Marco Jansen for their Test series against Bangladesh due to IPL commitments. New Zealand, meanwhile, will be missing 12 first-choice stars to the IPL for their white-ball series against the Netherlands.
And with the tournament expanding, Lloyd has voiced his concerns about the impact the IPL is having on international cricket in his latest column for the Daily Mail. "The alarm balls should be ringing," he wrote.
"Already, South Africa’s full attack is not available for upcoming Tests against Bangladesh, and New Zealand have 12 men ruled out of selection versus Afghanistan. Make no mistake, the IPL is disrupting the traditional international programme."
He is not the only one to have voiced concerns about the IPL's growing influence on the game, with former England captain Michael Atherton warning Test cricket will suffer because of it. Writing in the Times back in November, Atherton stated: "The calendar cannot contain the competing demands of international and franchise cricket as it is now.
"India will want a longer window and, who knows, maybe the owners will eventually want a second station carved out of the schedule. Cricketers will follow the money, if the market is left unchecked, and the least profitable aspects of the game will suffer — notably Test cricket among countries with small television markets.
"Relations between the players and their principal employers will fray. Some, like New Zealand, have simply accepted reality and allow their players absolute freedom to pick and choose.
"An imbalance of revenues, and the intense gravitational pull of IPL, puts stress on a game ill-equipped to withstand it. The advance of the IPL, and its satellite tournaments, will be hard to stop, but sport that exists only to create return for investors will lose the precious elements that hinder rather than help the bottom line."
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