England can thrive in life after Freddie

Flintoff has been included in the Twenty20 squad on the assumption that he recovers from knee surgery but national selector Geoff Miller indicated that plans are in place should Flintoff not be ready, so the management’s faith is not absolute. That faith has not been absolute for some time and it must have occurred to them that the Test team might be better off without him. To consider this claim we need to take into account not only Flintoff’s performances with bat and ball, but also what he brings to the dressing room and how much appetite he has for Test cricket. There has been speculation that he might quit Tests for the riches of Twenty20 cricket sooner rather than later.

It is improbable but the hint of their intentions was there last Wednesday in the dozen names. England have at their disposal two spin bowlers, Graeme Swann and Monty Panesar. In England, in May. The idea that both could make the final XI, and one must, is faintly ridiculous. England simply do not play two spinners unless one of them can also bat properly.But they may yet do so here partly because the Test pitches at Lord's in the last few years have given scant assistance to anybody, slope or no slope, and partly because there is the suspicion they might just have a strategy in mind for later in the summer.

You wonder how this reasonable and mild-mannered man will survive. Captain and opening batsman, his is the scalp the Aussies will want. So you ask the kind of question Brett Lee will ask. “The captaincy came with an issue: what to do about Kevin Pietersen’s sense of having been wronged. You could have said, ‘England need Pietersen, Pietersen needs England, let’s get on with it’. Or you could have decided you and Kevin needed to talk?”