The Wright road to follow

Strange though it is to remember now, there was a time when Fred Flintoff was not the darling of English cricket and his omission from the England side was seen as a reason to praise the selectors for finally seeing sense rather than as an excuse for the team's dismal performance.

He had attracted a lot of attention as a young player with Lancashire. He was a huge and hugely powerful middle-order batsman who was a pretty good bowler, allegedly of the fast variety. England, so desperate for a new Botham that they had been picking players like Mark Ealham, Adam Hollioake and Ronnie Irani, could not resist the temptation and picked him for both the Test and one-day sides. Over the next couple of years, though, it became apparent that he was too fat to bowl fast and too indisciplined to offer anything more with the bat than the occasional lucky explosion. England sent him back to Lancashire with the stern message that he need not worry himself about future selection unless and until he was fit enough to bowl as fast as his early billing had suggested – and, as history now records, he went off and shaped up with fairly dramatic results.

The point is two-fold. One, is that, what a player is like when he first plays for England may bear very little relation to the cricketer he eventually becomes. The other is that the gulf between English domestic limited-overs cricket and the international variety is far greater than between the four-day championship and Test match cricket. What makes you a very useful allrounder in the county 40 or 50-over formats, is nowhere near what is required to fulfill a similar role internationally.

Over the last two to three years Tim Bresnan has been building a considerable reputation in county cricket, but his nine ODI appearances for England have given little hint of why. His bowling has been tidy enough but has posed no problems for batsmen, and even though he has had several opportunities to do some whacking in a death-or-glory bid to rescue yet another dismal England batting performance, one struggles to remember him even playing an aggressive shot in an ODI. Though the England management are presumably being encouraging, it must have dawned on him by now that he is going to have to improve considerably if he is to have much of an international career.

That it can be done is shown not only by Flintoff but also now by Luke Wright, to whose presence in the England team I am now warming. Nor am I the only one: the gentleman who sat next to me on Sunday morning was also pleasantly surprised by how good Wright's bowling now is. After some discussion in which Barry Knight's name surfaced, we agreed that Wright is the reincarnation of the young Darren Gough. That's the Gough who was a quick but not very subtle bowler and a cheerful biffer capable of hitting Shane Warne and Craig McDermott all round the Sydney Cricket Ground. He was also a great trier; one who would always go down fighting because he didn't believe a game was lost until the last ball was bowled or the last wicket fell.

Gough's batting fell away after he was hit later on that 1994-95 tour, but Wright has played higher up the order often enough to suggest that the batting he clearly learned at an agricultural college is likely to remain a permanent feature, so if his bowling gains some of the guile that Goughie acquired, he could yet become an important part of the set-up.

The big change since Wright's debut is that he has moved up from being a 75-80 mph bowler to an 85-90 mph speedster with a dangerous, skiddy bouncer – that lifts him from being a county all-rounder to an international-class bowler-batsman. It will be interesting to see how he progresses from here. It will also be interesting to see whether Bresnan can effect a similar improvement.