Cricket: England's selectors delve into fantasy

By Richard Boock

Things have become so odd that it wouldn't be a complete surprise to see Mulder and Scully at Old Trafford next month, investigating just who is stealing the minds of the England cricket selectors.

The suggestion seems to be that somewhere in that murky dimension between being an England player and a selector, brains have been sucked out through nostrils, leaving the victims struggling to choose their shoes in the morning, let alone a test cricket team.

Ross Dykes and Co, rest easy.

Nothing our panel has picked over the past couple of seasons has been quite as hairy as the team the England selectors rolled out for the first two tests against New Zealand, and that's notwithstanding a couple of critical miscalculations in the selection of the Kiwi World Cup and test tour squads.

As England once again became the laughing stock of their own country (what do you call an English cricketer with 100 beside his name? A bowler. Why do English cricketers not have any pre-tour travel injections? They don't catch anything.), their selectors - as much as their players - are coming in for some deserved public stick.

Aftab Habib. Pinch me, someone.

The suggestion that chairman of selectors David Graveney and former test captains Graham Gooch, Mike Gatting and Ian Botham could consider Habib a better bat than Graeme Hick (53 tests, average 34.40, five centuries) should be evidence enough on its own. Minds are being lost.

And unless the team was picked while the selectors were flying over the Bermuda Triangle there doesn't seem to be much explanation either for the reluctance to bring back former captain Michael Atherton (88 tests, average 38.50, 12 centuries) - or for the introduction of new wicketkeeper Chris Read.

After about 10 years of preferring Alec Stewart's (88 tests, average 40.63, 12 centuries) utility role to Jack Russell's specialist glovework, the panel have pulled a complete u-turn in picking Read, and in doing so have inherited England's decade-old problem: imbalance.

Along with the dearth of all-rounders in the English game, Read's reduced batting role means England now have to carry an extra specialist batsman, leaving little room for manoeuvre in the attack and an inordinately long tail.

New Zealand had a similar problem at the start of the Steve Rixon era simply because their struggling batting side could not afford to carry a specialist wicketkeeper. Exit Lee Germon.

One can only wonder about how much better an England second test batting line-up of Atherton, Stewart, Nasser Hussain, Hick and Graeme Thorpe - with either an all-rounder or an extra batsmen at No.6 - would have coped, but it's a fair bet that the New Zealand attack preferred bowling at the one eventually picked.

If modern-day England cricket selectors tend to cop a bit of flak over the performance of their teams it's usually because they have this knack of dropping their very best players at least once - and sometimes several times - under the delusion they have better young players waiting in the wings

Allan Lamb, Robin Smith, David Gower of the recent era; Hick, Stewart, Hussain, Phil Tufnell of the present. Every one of them potential match-winners, all of them dropped at some stage of their careers.

Subsequently, and as pointed out in the English press the other day, no fewer than 66 players who have won an England cap are involved in the county championship this season, of whom 32 have played 10 tests or less. In other words, the selectors have picked enough players for six England teams, and nearly half of them are well short of becoming world famous.

A sobering thought for England supporters is that their team will fall to the bottom of the Wisden World Test Championship Table if they end up losing the present series.

New Zealand's selectors at least made a better fist of their most recent summer, with the enlightened recall of Roger Twose, along with Chris Harris, and the selection of Gary Stead - but the lack of batting cover in the World Cup squad proved a costly oversight.

There are strong suggestions too, that Matthew Bell is still not ready for the test environment, though his place as Matthew Horne's opening partner seems safe enough following the win at Lord's.

The challenge now is for the tour selectors to concede that the technically-challenged Harris - who managed to average 59.00 in three tests against South Africa last summer - is still a better option than Craig McMillan, who at the moment cannot buy a run at the top level.

If the penny doesn't drop in time for Harris to play at Manchester, Mulder and Scully will have another case on their hands.