The International Cricket Council may just have bitten off more than it can chew with its insistence that all players must sign a contract disengaging from personal endorsements that clash with tournament ones ahead of next month's Champions Trophy in Sri Lanka. Perhaps ICC thought that the players would just roll over and acquiesce; if so, they were wrong, and despite the bullish tones of the statements issued over the last week, ICC is worried - and rightly so.

In short, ICC has demanded that all players suspend any existing sponsorships they have during official tournaments, and also for 30 days before and after them. That means that in the coming nine months the players will have only three-and-a-half months in which to fulfill their obligations to their sponsors.

The players are unhappy, and for once it is not only just money which had stirred them up. Many of them earn considerable sums from third-party endorsements and have fostered mutually beneficial relationships with companies. The sponsors know that the main chance they have to exploit their clients' fame is when they perform on the international stage, and the World Cup is the blue riband event in world cricket. Robbed of the chance to maximise those events, the sponsors might well wonder exactly what they are getting for their money.

The players have expressed genuine concern that signing ICC's contract will leave them open for prosecution by their own sponsors for breach of contract. It is not as if the players are expecting to take the field looking like a mobile advertising hoarding. On the field their personal sponsorships (equipment excepted) are not relevant.

On Wednesday ICC upped the pressure on the players, hinting that any who refuse to cave in are merely motivated by greed. "If a player now finds that, through his own actions, he has put his commercial interests ahead of his ability to play for his country he needs to decide what is more important to him, the money or playing for his country," said Malcolm Speed, ICC's chief executive. He added that they had to sort out their contractual problems and not look to ICC to sort them out for them.

Speed dismissed the suggestion that the players were unaware of the situation when they entered into the contracts. "To my knowledge no player or his manager at any stage sought the view of the ICC as to the restrictions that would be in place before they signed these agreements," he said.

ICC has little option but to be aggressive. It has entered into lucrative contracts of its own, possibly offering an exclusivity that was, with hindsight, rather more difficult to deliver than to promise.

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