Mark, scott's reply to your statistics post is on page 12, he split it into two parts, one each for vaughan and tresco.
Excellent posts by everyone, interesting stuff. I'm more of a gut feeling person like scott, although ironically i remember saying that we needed to do something about vaughan and tresco on the bbc board and scott was one of the people to call me an idiot for even suggesting they should be dropped/moved
Opinions change though i guess, that's why cricket is so interesting.
I think the points made about butcher playing well at 3 so should stay there are good, he effectively opens at the moment anyway so i don't think his scores would go down if he was made to open, but don't see the need, if anything there would be less pressure on him as if he gets out at the moment it's 10-2 but if he gets out as opener it's only 10-1.
I think the best option for the first NZ test would be to drop giles and let strauss have a go in the side. Have tresco play these one dayers and if there is time a county match of some sort, if he doesn't get at least a bit of his form back then drop him down to 5 and let strauss open, with a call that whoever scores the most in the 3 games gets the nod for the windies (when the spinner place will be needed again).
If it was me picking the team out of the current squad i would say to strauss, hussain and tresco that they are fighting it out for 2 batting positions for the windies tests. I would also say to collingwood to go back to county cricket and get as much batting in as he can, if his average is a good deal higher than theirs (bearing in mind he'll face weaker attacks) then he'll be considered for the windies too. Wether i'd stick to it or not is a different matter, but competition is what some of them need
(seems to be working with the bowling).
Do people think pieterson will be an automatic shoe-in for the SA tour (barring horrendous county season obviously), as if so then dropping hussain for collingwood would be a bit pointless as he'd effectively just be keeping the seat warm, what if collie scores a century, 3 50's and a couple of 20-30's ? On the one hand it's a good decision to have to make as it means we have some good players to pick from, i'd be inclined to pick pieterson for the spinners berth, even if he's rubbish he can't be much worse than giles.
23-04-2004, 08:10 PM
in reply to Mark Kidger's post starting "Much to my astonishment I have just..." 
lol
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