When Adil Rashid announced his decision to focus solely on white-ball cricket, Yorkshire’s Director of Cricket Martyn Moxon expressed his belief that counties need players who can represent them across all three formats.

“You get the odd specialist, but county set-ups can’t accommodate specialists at this moment in time,” he said – a touch confusingly, given that he was responding to news of his county doing precisely that.

Moxon says that Rashid has “the ability to play in all three formats of the game,” yet Rashid himself clearly feels he would benefit from more time to practise. Reflecting on his reduced commitments in the coming season, he said: “I’ll use as much of the time I have to work on my white-ball cricket and I’ll just see where that takes me and what lies ahead.”

The unwanted consequence of this has however come to the fore since the recent decisions of Rashid, Alex Hales and (albeit for slightly different reasons) Reece Topley. Simply by dint of there being three formats, a missed game will often mean a long-term step towards one format and away from another.

It’s worth asking at this point whether this makes cricket ideal for squad rotation or spectacularly unsuited to it. You might think the former, but how many big names can cricket – and domestic cricket in particular – realistically sustain? Is cricket a big enough sport that it can spread its stars all the way from 20 overs to five days?

Football’s Premier League has largely become a squad game with the top teams managing the demands of midweek European commitments and weekend league fixtures via ever-larger pools of players.

However, tens of thousands turn out for every league match and widespread… actually, let’s be honest – borderline invasive media coverage means that even relatively minor squad players are generally pretty well known.

It’s a similar story in baseball, where they play a jaw-dropping 162 matches a season and each team boasts a correspondingly large roster of players. Again, the game can clearly sustain squads of this size with over 30,000 tickets sold per match on average during the 2017 season.

County cricket is simply not played on the same scale. Quite apart from the impossibility of running a large playing staff purely off the back of ticket sales, there’s also the not insubstantial challenge of trying to increase the profile of the sport. When well-known names from one format fail to turn out in another, it really doesn’t help win people over.

This is such a trite observation that it’s barely worth making, but would it not perhaps be preferable to run a greatly reduced fixture list that would allow the best players to turn out for pretty much every game in every format?