The Ashes 2006-07

Both dull and risky

Tim de Lisle

September 12, 2006

Andrew Flintoff: leading the dullest squad imaginable © Getty Images

This looked like being one of the most interesting England selections of recent years. Bob Willis even called it "one of the most difficult of all time". In fact, after all the build-up, the England selectors came up with the dullest squad imaginable.

There are no new caps, no wild cards, no dramatic recalls. The 16 names were announced live on Sky, with a degree of fanfare that verged on the preposterous, but they were hardly exciting. It was the XI that played in the last Test, plus three Ashes winners (Flintoff, Geraint Jones, Giles) and two regular reserve bowlers (James Anderson and Liam Plunkett). All the fringe places have gone to familiar faces. There is a whiff of a closed shop.

Dull isn't necessarily bad. It can be a sign of a solid, settled side. But the guiding principle here seems to have been: stick with the devil you know, even if he is liable to turn up on two sticks. The selectors have played safe with the names, but they have taken a huge risk with their fitness.

Flintoff, Giles and Anderson still haven't returned from major injuries. Plunkett and Harmison are currently unfit. And the biggest question mark of all hangs over the head of Marcus Trescothick, who has an illness that dare not speak its name - "a stress-related illness" that has ruled him out of international action in October, but apparently not in November. So six of the 16 are a fitness risk. It has to be too many.

When they won the Ashes last year, England famously used only 12 players. This time, they will be doing very well if they stick to 16.

The second big worry concerns experience. The selectors seeem to have been conscious of this, because they went for Jones over James Foster, Giles over Jamie Dalrymple, and Anderson over Jon Lewis and Stuart Broad. But they still haven't fixed it, because all these men are going as reserves. If, say, Trescothick and Flintoff are still not fit, the team for the first Test could be severely inexperienced, with Matthew Hoggard, on 58 Tests, as the father of the house - and Andrew Strauss straight back as captain.

The third worry is spray-gun bowling. England's lowest point of the summer came in the one-dayers against Sri Lanka, when the fast bowling was atrocious. The culprits were Steve Harmison, Saj Mahmood and Liam Plunkett, and all three of them are in this squad. The selectors are putting a lot of faith in Mahmood and Plunkett, and indirectly, in the new bowling coach Kevin Shine, who has a hard act to follow - and rival - in Troy Cooley.

This is not a squad to frighten the Aussies. If fit, they could still be good enough to retain the Ashes. But that's a very big if.

Tim de Lisle is a columnist for Cricinfo and The Times and a former editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. He has just started a Cricinfo blog, Ashes Buzz.

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