Cricket Australia operations manager Michael Brown said in a statement, "It is uncharted territory… We are in an unprecedented period of playing cricket and we are conscious of the number of new players into the team and the number of new partners, young families, newly married players.

"It is a great opportunity for us to take a more holistic approach to welfare, management, relationships and (to) work with some experts." The wives and girlfriends have travelled with the cricketers before, but it has never been so big a deal, and they definitely haven’t been involved in training camps of any kind before.

Australian Cricketers' Association chief Paul Marsh is quoted telling the telegraph: "This is not just about taking the girls up to the camp and talking to them. It's about helping the families spend some more time together before their husbands leave again… It's a small part of a more comprehensive program."

The Australian squad for the World Twenty20 Championship has already left for England, and with the Ashes in tow, and then a one-day series following that, many of the cricketers will not return back home until late September.

Only a while earlier, Cricket Administrators opposed the idea of wives and girlfriends accompanying the cricketers, terming it as a distraction. The WAGS being at a camp when you're setting up for your next six months of cricket, I don't know that that's the way it needs to go, I don't think it's right," Slater had said.

However, Michael Clarke differed saying “Having my partner on tour is definitely not a distraction". "We're embarking on such a long tour, I think it's a wonderful opportunity that Cricket Australia gives us to allow the wives and partners to come on any tour, not just the Ashes.” "Anywhere we go around the world the partners are more than welcome.”

Perhaps the prospect of the ladies accompanying the cricketers brings back bad memories of Australia’s Ashes loss in 2005. The WAGS issue was the trouble then, or at least Gilchrist so revealed in his book True Colours.

"It was apparent, when the guys returned to the hotel from Lord's, that some personality clashes had disrupted relations between wives and players," Gilchrist wrote.

"A guy would go out to dinner with his partner and hear bad things about someone else's partner… You could be sure that the same was happening somewhere else, in reverse… So it ended up that some of the guys were suffering from their divided loyalties."

The camp this year for the WAGS was only meant to prevent such things from repeating themselves. But apparently the idea did not go down to well as, according to the Daily Telegraph, partners of just over half the 16 — and their children — attended the two sessions.

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3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."

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