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India will have to make do with just one warm-up match on their gruelling year-end tour of Australia after the cricket board on Tuesday ruled out any extra games.

A crammed calendar will see India tackle world-beating Australia in December-January in four Tests followed by a triangular series.

And they will have to do that after only one warm-up game against state side Victoria before the first Test at Melbourne from December 26.

Skipper Rahul Dravid had urged the board to look into the possibility of having more than one practice match to help the team acclimatise.

“There’s no chance of adding any extra games. The players may want more but where is the time?” Board of Control for Cricket in India secretary Niranjan Shah told the Press Trust of India.

Dravid had called for better tour schedules during the just concluded tour of rain-lashed Bangladesh.

“Ideally, the timing of the series (in Bangladesh) could have been better. But schedules are crammed, over-crammed if you ask me. I don’t know how we are going to fit everything in,” he said.

“The solution is that we have to get the scheduling right and try to get certain number of Test and One-day Internationals (ODIs). We should try not to exceed that number and plan our tours well and prepare well for them.”

Source:The News