New Zealand Cricket chief executive Christopher Doig said there were distinct advantages for NZC in the agreement of all countries in the adoption of a 10-year cycle of tours that has been introduced.

It allowed for the tour guarantee system to be dropped.

"If there is an even number of games played on tours between countries there is no exchange of monies by way of guarantees," he said.

Doig said that there had been many instances under the old scheme where tour guarantees were not completed between countries until tours were well underway. This caused some problems for budgeting, especially when visiting countries asked more than was expected.

Under the tour scheme, Australia would now have to pay New Zealand for the extra games it is required to play on tours of that country for the three-nation ODI series played every year.

Because of the number of games involved, New Zealand would not be able to stage as many games on a return tour of this country.

"The only country that really resisted the programme was the West Indies, as they had made much of their money out of touring," he said.

"International cricket will prosper because of this programme. At the moment Test series and ODIs have no context at all."

A regular programme of home and away series within the 10-year cycle would make it easier to gauge which country could rightly claim to be the best in the world.

Doig said there was also discussion going on at the moment about introducing a qualification programme for the four-yearly World Cup.

He said that officials from World Sport and News Limited, which have the rights to international cricket until 2007 had made the point that the less cricket that is played the higher the value of it would be.

Doig believed that ideally New Zealand should play between nine and 11 ODIs at home each year with five home Tests. He thought the 13 scheduled for this year was too many.

But that had been brought about because of problems in Pakistan's scheduling of games. It was found when a new chief executive was in place in Pakistan that commitments had been made to be in four different countries at the same time.

Because of that South Africa missed out on hosting Pakistan for a Test series. However, New Zealand agreed to forgo Test matches with Sri Lanka, which was originally going to play the Boxing Day Test in Wellington, and play only ODIs with Sri Lanka. Zimbabwe, which was in Australia, was then asked to come for the Boxing Day match.

© CricInfo