And Matt Renshaw will play golf, which is what he expected anyway before his sudden elevation to the Test team last month.

Though the squad to tour India next month has not been announced, this 12 can reasonably be expected to be at its core. India is always a battle for Australia, and presently the stiffest challenge for any team in the world, and the least quality Australia will need is concerted effort. Yet in plotting Australia's passage to India, coach Darren Lehmann would be best advised to turn over his team sheet and use it as a spreadsheet.

Presently, not even one so-called tour match, for acclimatisation's sake, is scheduled in India. The prelude as currently set down consists of a pre-tour camp in Dubai, in mocked-up Indian conditions, then straight into the mouth of the tiger.

This hotchpotch is far from ideal. It's easy enough to identify the causes. Cricket boasts to be unique in having three forms for public delectation, but they do not so much mesh as jostle, among themselves and with commercial considerations. Once, two Tests were kept for the end of January, then it was given over entirely to one-dayers. Now the BBL holds sway, putting all first-class cricket on hold for a month at the heart of the season.

It means that when pitching for a place on an autumn Test tour, incumbent players can only stand on their records and wannabes must depend on catching eyes with occasional feats of derring-do in short-form cricket. Selectors have only their hunches, coaches their hypotheses.

What to do? Ideally, all the forms and competitions would stream along together, with players appearing in whichever best fits their talents and the country's needs, but that is not going to happen. More ideally, Tests would be redistributed across the program. This year, Australia played six in nine weeks, a doubtful cornucopia, though it had the unexpected benefit of hastening the crisis, spill and remaking of the national team.

But the Test program will not change. If anything, in the foreseeable future, the BBL's grip on peak season will only tighten as it expands; more clubs and games are mooted. Don't ever try to tell a CFO that there is any such thing as too much of a good thing.

But if Cricket Australia's mission is the greater glory of the game, as it always claims, there is a worthwhile tinker, a partial putting of Humpty together again. The Sheffield Shield could and should be rethreaded through the fixture in December and January.

It would not be as difficult as is commonly made out. It could be squeezed in at the big grounds. The MCG, for instance, has only five scheduled days of cricket in January, cricket's supposed peak hour, with spaces as long as nine days. But if not Test grounds, there are outgrounds aplenty. It is not as if outgrounds are beneath the Shield's dignity; the last two seasons have soared to their climaxes variously in Alice Springs, Hobart and Adelaide's Glenelg Oval.

A rejigged shield would put an end to the nonsense of what is now two half-seasons, months apart. It would provide players with continuity and a proving ground, selectors with a form line. Theoretically, it would give O'Keefe this month the sort of serious cricket the selectors fear he lacks. It would occupy Renshaw gainfully, too.

It would not be without problems. Notionally, the players are furious with the emasculation of the shield now. The depth of that fury would be tested if they had to choose between 80,000 at the MCG in the BBL and two-and-a-dog at Kardinia Park, or more to the point, if the choice was made for them.

But all – administrators, ancillaries, players – say they want only what is best for Australian cricket. Surely, that includes a coherent, competitive and productive fixture, not just BBL and sundry sops.