This weekend, England's cricketers have been called back from the sultry whirl of the Indian Premier League to attend a pre-World Cup training camp in South Wales.
Under previous regimes, the summons would probably have meant camp fires and 30-kilometre yomps with weighted backpacks.
Yet that is hardly the style of head coach Trevor Bayliss, the avuncular Australian who often looks like he would rather be napping on his back porch. So the diary has been limited to the bare essentials.
A team dinner, followed by routine fitness tests over the next couple of days, and then maybe a spot of golf on Tuesday.
This is surely good news for the players, who could do with a quiet weekend away from the Twenty20 carousel. It is disastrous for us reporters, though.
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Shane Watson (left) and Shane Warne carry a jerrycan of water during the Australians' Queensland boot camp in 2006.Credit:AP
Few sporting rituals are more prone to produce facepalm moments – and thus memorable copy – than the pre-tournament boot camp.
Think of the 2010 trip to Bavaria organised by Andy Flower, just before the England team flew south for the Ashes. The one described by Graeme Swann as "easily the worst four days of my life".
The players spent the trip taking verbal abuse from a pair of Australian invigilators – a close approximation of the winter to come – and carrying each other around on stretchers.
But things took an embarrassing turn when man-mountain Chris Tremlett cracked one of James Anderson's ribs during a white-collar boxing bout.
Flower was not giving up on his obsession with the military, however, and his next foray into the same territory proved even weirder.
In September 2013, the players were sent to Stafford in the West Midlands. As fast bowler Boyd Rankin recalled: "We were doing some surveillance of terrorists. Or they were set up as terrorists.
"We seemed to spend a lot of time in cars. We were told to blend in with our environments, so it probably did not help that I [am] 6ft 8in."
One wonders how much money was spent on these bizarre exercises, or if anyone noticed the lack of correlation with results. But there is another, more serious point here. In cricket, of all sports, it rarely pays to have 11 dutiful Strausses and Collingwoods. The great ones, from Don Bradman to Geoffrey Boycott and Kevin Pietersen, are usually unabashed individualists who dislike being told what to do by anyone, let alone a pair of Aussie ex-coppers.
Unsurprisingly, Pietersen described the 2013 camp as "the biggest shambles [that] gave us a hint about what our winter was going to be like".
Earlier, the equally maverick Shane Warne had bitterly resented being sent on a route march around the outback by Australia coach John Buchanan – and was only persuaded to stay when he was allowed to keep his beloved Benson & Hedges.
In both cases, the relationship between these awkward-squad members and their coaches became deeply – and publicly – toxic.
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