So John Howard thinks too much international cricket is being played. It's too hard on the players, he said in Bowral on the weekend.

Fair enough, I guess, but as Australia's proposed man on the International Cricket Council, Mr Howard might need to do better than bland player-friendly platitudes - particularly considering that it's the ICC's future tours program, locked in several years ahead of time, and its open-door policy to T20 cricket, which are most responsible for the explosion in cricket scheduling.

Let's give Mr Howard the benefit of the doubt and presume that he's not just saying the first thing off the top of his head, placed there by his last friendly chat with Mark Taylor or Matthew Hayden. Let's presume that when he goes onto the ICC (if Zimbabwe let him!), Mr Howard would like to do something about cutting down cricket's mad schedules.

As he will soon learn, when it comes to cricket programming the ICC is the instrument of the member nations, and the key voting bloc of member nations is the instrument of India. India, in turn, is the instrument of Indian television networks, which are the instrument of a billion viewers who would be perfectly happy to enslave international cricketers to leap about excitingly 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year. The gap between this appetite and the limited number of international cricketers who can satisfy it is filled by tournaments such as the Indian Premier League and this month's World T20 championship in the Caribbean.

If Mr Howard thinks he can shuffle into Dubai and use his great personal prestige and diplomatic skills to do anything about those facts, then the criticism of Australia's nominating him won't just be coming from the old Howard-hating domestic rump. It could be an error that pushes Australia onto the margins of cricket's policy-making world for a decade.

In an unfriendly act towards New Zealand, Australia has pushed Howard to be the next ICC vice-president ahead of experienced Kiwi cricket administrator John Anderson. The convention would be that after a term as ICC vice-president, Howard would assume the presidency.

This is a nice job for a cricket-loving former prime minister. He'll be able to travel the world with Janette watching games. He can hobnob with his heroes. No doubt Taylor, as a current member of the Cricket Australia board, was influential in putting forward the name of his old admirer, whose glory days as PM coincided with Taylor's stint as Australian captain.

The nomination of Howard has been attacked from many sides. In Australia, there is the political reflex. There is also the widely held belief that Howard's passion for cricket has never been matched by much knowledge or sense of the game. It's safe to say there are a hundred thousand Australians who know their cricket better than John Howard does.

But that's not what he's been appointed for. Rather, it's his political nous(!). This can be the only reason to put forward a former prime minister rather than an experienced backroom political operator - that is, a cricket administrator. But if Howard brings any skills to the table, he also brings a wagonload of baggage. Zimbabwe's opposition to his nomination, as a reprisal for his attacks on Zimbabwe while in government, are just the beginning. You can be sure that India, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and their allies, the centre of cricket's gravity these days, will be trawling through Howard's past to put him in a position where he can do their interests least harm. His attitude to dealing with apartheid South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s will be brought up. His political engagement with the subcontinent will be raked over. The story, at various stages, will not be about the issues faced by the ICC; the story will be John Howard.

Howard may or may not be able to overcome the problems of his past. But the point of the criticism is, if it were a John Anderson going into the ICC, or someone like Australia's much-praised former ICC president Malcolm Gray, the opportunity to exploit such a political past would not exist. Howard's record is, somewhere down the line, going to provide a massive distraction from whatever the ICC or Australia will be trying to achieve. His appointment has multiple downside risks. It's hard, at this point, to see the upside.