Selectors make a meal of English fare (16 August 1999)

16 August 1999

Selectors make a meal of English fare

Michael Henderson

Five green selectors sitting on a wall Five green selectors sitting on a wall And if one wasted wicket should accidentally fall There'll be four green selectors sitting on a wall . . . And if the next wicket should fall with the very next ball There'll be three green selectors sitting on a wall

Some time over the weekend - I doubt they left it to a working breakfast yesterday, though you never know - the remaining three selectors for the last Test in the series against New Zealand (score so far; inventors of the game 0, visiting sheep shearers 1, London Weather Centre 2) sat down with a blank piece of paper to pick 13 men to represent our great country; so great in fact our Prime Minister can't wait to get out of it for his holidays. Blank, that was, except for eight names, 10 if you include those who have won an England cap at some stage in the dim and distant past.

So how do you think they go about picking England's squad? Do you think David Graveney picks the names from a leather-bound folder like he might a Chateauneuf du Pape from the wine list? Do you think they talk all round the subject - much like a English batsman playing a straight ball from Dion Nash - before they mention the job in hand? Do they, and you have to wonder whether this wasn't the case on occasions in the recent past, even know why they are dining together?

It was always on the cards that the captain, Nasser Hussain, was going to pick himself and if he did that then he was duty bound to pick his two predecessors Alec Stewart and Mike Atherton.

Next, best friends whom he said he would sack without compunction? That brings in Thorpey and Ramps and that's the batting virtually sorted, though Atherton could do with someone to help him along for those slipped-disc moments. Who better than the extremely fit Darren Maddy who, in the absence of Darren Gough, will also fill that essential other requirement: that there's a Darren in the national team (for football, see: Anderton). If you can do 500 consecutive sit-ups as Darren II can, then pushing Atherton up and down the wicket in his wheelchair as well as accumulating your own runs shouldn't be a problem.

All-rounders? England haven't had someone genuinely all-round since the portly Eddie Hemmings. Though we inspire it in foreigners, English players who can bat and bowl well in the same match have been in short supply since Ian Botham though, ironically, plenty of bowlers have batted better than they've bowled and vice versa. So in come Ronnie Irani and Graeme Swann. Pick two and one of them might work out, particularly young Swann, which brings us to the front-line bowlers and, I should imagine, presuming this took place over dinner on Saturday night, pudding.

Andrew Caddick and Alan Mullally have the T-shirts and no doubt a few stolen stumps from the first Test, so their selection is pretty much automatic. You always need someone with stumps. Chris Silverwood is a karate black-belt, a qualification which pretty much demands selection too. He has made the squad several times this summer without actually making the team. In this series he has made his mark as a demon 12th man bringing on the drinks - Chris Silvertray - and had a great deal of success getting the occasional off-seaming orange squash to stick in the hands of the slips. Phil Tufnell is the best English spinner outside New Labour so he's on board too. Unless there was a fly in Graveney's soup no surprises so far then.

That, of course, brings us to the cheese board and port and perhaps the most predictable selection of all, Ed Giddins, who was banned for 18 months in 1987 after traces of cocaine were found in a drug test. No England team these days are replete without their 'reformed character', former addict or graduate from the Priory clinic of excellence. Take footballers Tony Adams and Paul Merson for example. The jury - whether he took drugs and whether he is even in the team - is out for another week on rugby's Lawrence Dallaglio.

Giddins would have played for his country earlier were it not for that little slip or sniff or whatever it is you do to cocaine. And in a small way you have to pity him, because even if he gets six wickets in an over on Thursday he is always going to be player who was done for the big 'C' word.

He's a lively character which is just what this England needemphasis on 'live'. The Oval is as good a place for him to start as any, because he will be able to begin his run-up from one of his more regular haunts, the King's Road and, who knows, a couple of years in exile might have been the making of him.

In his foolishness he did, perhaps, stumble upon a politically incorrect solution to England's problems. In 1903, so worried by the lack of inaction by the Jockey Club to ban stimulants - one winning horse had even dashed into a wall and killed itself at the end of a race - leading trainer George Lambton said he would give cocaine to his six worst horses.

Four won, one was second and the other never received the stimulant. The next year the administration of stimulants became an offence under Jockey Club Rules.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)