Selectors, sins and bins

"I'm going to help pick a few names out of the hat." So quipped David Gower, that master of gentle sardonicism, shortly after being reappointed England captain in 1989. By the end of that summer's Aldermanning by Allan Border's revitalised Australians, the newly-formed England Cricket Committee had plucked 29 names from their topper, 13 of whom played just once. What is generally forgotten is that three debutants, Mike Atherton, Angus Fraser and Devon Malcolm, all went on to carve their names in the nation's heart.

Even during their most blush-worthy periods, selectors are seldom utterly wrong. And nor, even when all is going swimmingly, do they necessarily get things wholly right. Thus it was with the unprecedentedly early announcement of the England XI for the Oval Test. The timing, three days before the toss and plainly designed to reassure Alastair Cook, exemplified the sensitivity and fairness we have come to expect, even demand, in the age of the central contract. File it alongside dads attending births as a sign of progress. The retention of Stuart Broad, conversely, smacked of warped priorities and mangled morals.

Team selection is only straightforward when options are limited or the occupants are uniformly in form. When you've won six Tests on the trot, regardless of the poverty of the opposition, it is too easy to leave well alone. Yet victory can mask deficiencies, as Alec Bedser and pals acknowledged after the 1981 Headingley Test, responding to a magical, if somewhat fortunate, triumph by dropping one of the conjurors, Graham Dilley, a fast bowler who'd reserved his sorcery for the striker's crease, in favour of John Emburey, a spinner. Sentiment be damned.

Another improbable win followed, at Edgbaston, with Emburey to the fore, whereupon two more heroes were shelved for the next chapter at Old Trafford: keeper Bob Taylor (skipper Mike Brearley insisted on recalling an all-round mini-genius, Alan Knott) and allrounder Peter Willey (Chris Tavare stiffened the top order). Not even hindsight could find fault.

As a show of humanity and faith, sticking with Cook - who at 25 has already racked up 12 Test centuries, more than Ted Dexter, Mike Gatting or Tom Graveney managed in their entire careers - was admirable. Brave, too. Over England's last 15 Tests he has averaged 36.57, , least among the regular specialists; subtract 401 runs at 66.83 against Bangladesh and the fruits, such as they are, have been 550 at 27.50 in 20 knocks, with one hundred and three fifties. Twenty-four innings for Essex this summer have yielded one hundred and five fifties, three of the latter, instructively, in Twenty20, a format wherein he has flown the flag just four times. Form is a distant memory, class barely detectable. Yet just as the Australian selectors stuck with another opener, Mark Taylor, while he, their captain, was enduring 21 innings without reaching 50, so another factor has spiced up the usual calculations - Cook is, after all, Andrew Strauss's heir apparent. Besides, what better for waning confidence than back-to-back games on those flat mattresses at The Oval and Lord's?

On another level, retaining Cook is unpragmatic if not downright foolish. Pakistan might be demoralised in the field and bereft with the bat, but the quality of their pace attack, even in the absence of Umar Gul, would be an ideal examination for an alternative opener such as Jonathan Trott, Michael Carberry, or even a young thruster such as Yorkshire's prolific Adam Lyth.

Albeit batting down the order, Carberry was a key figure for Hampshire on Saturday, when Twenty20 Finals Day at the Rose Bowl brought an undeservedly rousing conclusion to the competition's un-businesslike excesses (if more fixtures than an entire County Championship campaign doesn't qualify as overkill and misplaced priorities, I am at a loss to know what does). On an occasion marred only by Kieron Pollard's horrific injury, and decided somewhat surreally by Somerset's ignorance of the law governing runners, the main joybringers were a terrific trio of 19-year-olds: Hampshire's flighty left-arm slowie Danny Briggs and nifty stumper Michael Bates plus, most thrillingly of all, Taunton's inventive swashbuckler Jos Buttler. To see Cook free his arms and slap a few "have-at-thee-o-vile-critics" boundaries was a tonic too, not least because he put his foot in it, or rather, his feet.

Distracted as he is by all those obsessive-compulsive trigger movements, can we wonder that Cook has scant time for footwork? Even when those soles do shift, it is all too often too little, let alone too late. And there lies the rub. Gower, Virender Sehwag and Marcus Trescothick are rare exceptions to the golden rule: light feet = big feats. Nor is it any coincidence that all three are/were attacking batsmen with fast hands, enabling them to make light of such a flaw.

Significantly, bar a stoical and crucial 118 in Durban, Cook's best two innings during his personal recession have come when he's let his hair down - 95 in a dash over three hours to give his side a flying start in that drought-breaking Ashes victory at Lord's, and a match-winning century in Dhaka against the clock. Brett Lee, Shaun Tait, Jason Gillespie, Michael Kasprowicz and Stuart MacGill might also recall his rollicking 214 off 238 balls for Essex in 2005. Here, one cannot help but conclude, is where salvation lies.

FOR BROAD, SALVATION almost certainly lies in the opposite direction. Until this summer, I had only twice been ashamed of an England bowler. The first time was at Lord's in 1971, when big, bad John Snow shoulder-barged little Sunil Gavaskar as if disputing possession in a schoolyard soccer scrap. The second offender, more improbably, was Steve Harmison, a courteous and generous soul, who in Faisalabad in 2005 somehow saw fit to hurl the ball at Inzamam-ul-Haq and hence, with the complicity of the umpires, run out Pakistan's captain as he took evasive action. When Broad fired the ball at Zulqarnain Haider at Trent Bridge, he committed a more grievous sin than Snow or Harmison. And not just because, in doing so, he may have aggravated the finger injury that truncated Haider's tour.

Unlike Snow, Broad didn't have the alibi that he was trying to field the ball while contending with a scampering batsman. Unlike Harmison, he couldn't even claim, however tendentiously and self-servingly, that he was aiming at the stumps. No, this was purely a fit of pique, an eruption from the bubbling well of frustration. Snow was suspended for the next Test, five priceless paydays lost; to Broad, who shops at Dolce & Gabbana, confesses to having a "thing" for expensive watches, and has his suits handmade, a £3000 ICC fine amounted to a mild tut.

Trouble is, while Chris Broad also played at the highest level, and was even reborn as an estimable ICC referee, he hardly set his son the finest of examples. For too long now, in fact, son has appeared hell-bent on outdoing father, diluting and diminishing his own considerable achievements with even more egocentricity and petulance. Stepping over the line is becoming a nasty habit. Compassion is due - his stepmother died last month - but forgiveness would be simpler were it not for the lengthy charge list. Shahid Afridi bites balls and gouges pitches, but when it comes to sullying the game's largely good name, Broad Jr's look-at-me surliness is fast making him Public Enemy No.1.

It needn't be this way. Such is his ability with new ball and old, Broad has it in him to lead his country's attack for the next decade, and even become England's most complete seamer since Ian Botham's pomp. He could also be a vibrant No. 8 once he learns that singles are as important as sixes. First, though, he must master a nobler art - humility.

Unlike the likes of Dennis Lillee and Javed Miandad, Broad is playing in an era of goldfish-bowl scrutiny, one in which cricket's hourly reach can be measured not in thousands but billions. Misdeeds, thanks to satellite TV and the internet, are far more visible, rectifying them vastly more necessary. Which is why Broad should have been suspended for this week's Test, if not longer. In resisting an option that would have sent appreciative waves rippling across the oceans, the selectors failed to send the requisite message: no player, no matter how valuable, can behave with impunity. The choice, though, should not have been theirs (even though, apropos the Snow incident, it was Bedser and his co-selectors who claimed responsibility for dropping the Sussex man on disciplinary grounds). In ducking any official sanction, the England and Wales Cricket Board did not so much pass as chuck the buck.

The obvious antidote, if we are to make Broad and his ill-tempered ilk think twice, is to take one leaf from rugby's book and another, however reluctantly, from soccer's. Umpires who are privately unhappy about the way technology is eroding their responsibilities would surely not be alone in welcoming both the sin bin (a session or day in the pavilion, depending on the length of contest) and a punitive card system (bacon and egg instead of red and yellow). And yes, those who attempt to pervert justice via the UDRS - umpire misses blatant edge, decision overturned on appeal - should be eligible.

It's a pity, however inevitable, that it should come to this, but the prospect of having misdemeanours so openly exposed and instantly punished, in the team sport that values decorum and propriety like no other, ought to prove a worthwhile deterrent. Throw in an annual "It's Not Cricket" award for serial offenders (The Grace Trophy?) and we may really get somewhere.