All those wise sages warning about the volume of cricket, and its effects on fast bowlers especially, had further fuel to add to their fire last week when Brett Lee had to pull out of Australia's ODI series with India.

With Mitchell Johnson, the only other Australian bowler you would pay to watch (even if, during the Ashes, it was mainly to laugh at him) also playing through pain, the Aussies have the look of a team suffering from too much action.

It's a real shame that fans are denied the chance to see Lee in full flight - and who knows if Johnson will get through the series in India unscathed. But this is the way cricket is going: the constant treadmill of matches makes it increasingly hard to see a genuine quick putting together a string of appearances for his country.

There is a dearth of top quality fast bowlers in international competition at the moment and the situation will only get worse. Lee says that his latest injury setback was not caused by the Champions League, but coach Tim Nielsen says the injury is stress (as in workload) related; and both he and Ricky Ponting have grumbled about the scheduling of the Champs League so close to the ongoing ODI series with India.

As the most physically demanding of all the game's disciplines, bowling at 90 miles per hour is going to be the one to suffer most in the packed calendar. And that's a great shame, because there is no finer sight in the game than an out-and-out quick. It's not just better bats and duller pitches that have meant that 50 is the new 40 when it comes to Test averages: batsmen just don't have to face the amount of menacing bowling that they did only a few years ago. Is it really right that Alastair Cook averages more in Tests than Graham Gooch?

It could be that this is just cyclical, we are living in a period with an unusually high number of superb batsmen and a similarly small pool of good quicks. But it seems to me that we are likely to see less 90-miles-per-hour bowlers, not more over the next few years, especially if Twenty20 really does take centre stage. Extreme pace does not seem to be the most effective weapon in the format. So why put your body through that if you can make more money (and be fit for more games) as a canny trundler?

This may be a shame for cricket as a spectacle, but there may be one beneficiary. Step forward, England. They have a deep well of decent fast-medium seamers at the moment and, if they do now lack someone with the ability to beat class batsmen with true pace, then... well, so will everyone else. Maybe cricket will come to be about who can actually get three or four seamers of something approaching international quality onto the park. Our much-derided system of having roughly 450,000 full-time professional cricketers is coming into its own in these days of last man standing.

It might not be glorious, but England's battery of just-short-of-top-notch 85mph seamers - James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Graham Onions, Ryan Sidebottom, Tim Bresnan, Liam Plunkett, Sajid Mahmood and Luke Wright - will be a useful pool from which to draw. We are in what history will surely look back upon as an attritional era for international cricket and England are better placed than most to declare: never mind the quality, feel the width.

Alan Tyers