England need Bopara's hunger and arrogance

This new selection panel are picking on character and hunger and that is a development I welcome. I can certainly never see someone like Flower selecting a player on the back of their reputation and that has been evident in the first two Test squads of the summer. Crucially, he is of the same mind as his captain and the national selector, writes Nasser Hussain in the Daily Mail.

I always liked to have players of character in my England side and I can see plenty of it in the likes of Ravi Bopara, Graeme Swann and Graham Onions. When you speak to Bopara, he will talk you through all his shots but you come away thinking, ‘what a lovely lad’, rather than ‘what a prat’. He has confidence and even arrogance but it manifests itself in an infectious, thoroughly likeable way. His was a match-winning contribution in his first taste of a Lord’s Test but what I would be saying to him now is go out at the Riverside and make it three hundreds in successive Tests — that would be staking a pretty decent claim for an Ashes place!