The tourists overcame a spate of injuries, mainly to the bowlers, to claim a share of the two-match Twenty20 series with the hosts and there have also been encouraging signs from most of their batsmen.

They face South Africa A in a 50-over warm-up match in Potchefstroom on Tuesday and Flower is confident they are in good shape heading into the first game of the five-match one-day series starting in Johannesburg on Friday.

"Our preparation in Bloemfontein was excellent - they were great hosts, the facilities were good, so that preparation went as well as we could have hoped," he said of the start to the two-and-a-half month tour.

"The warm-up games were good, of course we would have liked to have won on Sunday but that wasn't to be, so we go into the one-day series feeling good about ourselves."

However, the one negative for England is that injury list and the growing number of players being added to it, with James Anderson (knee), Stuart Broad (shoulder) and Graeme Swann (intercostal muscle) already ruled out for the clash against the Proteas' second-stringers.

Paul Collingwood (back), who missed the game on Sunday, is a major doubt for the match at Senwes Park and with a tough winter of cricket still ahead - England travel to Bangladesh after five one-dayers and four Tests in South Africa - the injury problems continue to be a worry for Flower.

Asked if he was concerned with the schedule, Flower continued: "Yes, I am. We had a very heavy summer, then three weeks off and then we started again with gusto in Bloemfontein.

"We worked really hard and unfortunately we have picked up some of these niggles."

The three weeks that Flower was referring to was the break England had between the Champions Trophy and the tour to South Africa.

With the current nature of the international cricket calendar, it leaves most countries with a packed schedule and the coach revealed that it may lead to a future which sees his players being forced to be rested.

He added: "Ideally you need bigger chunks of time to get the proper conditioning into people. Of course on a two-and-a-half-month tour like this, the guys work extremely hard both on the field and off it.

"Trying to get that balance right between rest time, conditioning time, practice time and competitive time, is quite difficult. So yeah, three weeks off is not an ideal length of time.

"I think in the future we are going to have to target certain periods for strengthening, condition programmes for some of these fast bowlers especially and for them to miss the odd international because of it."

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