Fair enough, but even if Flintoff wasn't picked, with six specialist batsmen - that's still a tail of Read, Mahmood (or Plunkett or Anderson) Harmison, Panesar and Hoggard. Read's not worth his place in that side, with that tail.

I absolutely agree that batsmen should score the runs and bowlers take the wickets. Read my posts on the idiocy of Giles playing instead of Panesar, for example. The point, however, is that with the tail England have a reasonable start will never be converted. Of course, if two of the top six score hundreds, you have no problem. But that rarely happends. Take Sydney as the perfect example. In normal circumstances, 240-4 is a solid day for the batting side. Nothing spectacular, but nothing to worry about either. However, pretty much everyone was expecting the worst - which we saw last night. There has to be some back-up for the batsmen, and I don't mind playing four specialists, but your number seven must be capable of scoring Test hundreds. Look around the world - Gilchrist, Pollock or Boucher, McCullum or Oram or Vettori, Kamran Akmal or Abdur Razzaq, Dhoni (or Sehwag in this Test!), all eminently capable of scoring big hundreds. Read simply doesn't compare. Unless you have decent back-up at number eight (think Vaas for Sri Lanka), there is simply no way that you can succeed regularly with such a poor tail.

I've supported Read for a long time, but it's time to make a positive step and move forward.