  While studying the continual gravitational collapse of a massive matter cloud
in general relativity towards examining collapse final states, an important
issue is that of whether shell-crossing singularities can develop as the
collapse evolves. We examine this here to show that for any spherically
symmetric collapse in general, there is always a finite neighborhood of the
center in which there are no shell-crossings taking place. It follows that in
order to study the final genuine shell-focusing singularity of collapse where
the physical radius of the matter cloud shrinks to a vanishing value, we can
always consider without any loss of generality a collapsing ball of a finite
comoving radius in which there are no shell-crossings taking place. This
clarifies an important point for gravitational collapse studies.
