England team unravels as injuries take hold

Like a cashmere cricket woolly snagged on a dressingroom nail, the England team that started the first Test is unravelling before our eyes. Gone already is Darren Gough, his thumb shattered during the Edgbaston game, and this morning at Lord's he may be joined on the casualty list by the captain Alec Stewart, who has a dodgy back, and the opener Mark Butcher, who injured his left thumb on Monday.

As a precaution Steve James, the Glamorgan opener, Graeme Hick and Jack Russell have been added to the squad.

Butcher's is the more serious of the injuries. In the latter stages of Surrey's game with Essex he hurt his thumb dropping a catch. There is no break but the thumb was still swollen and tender yesterday; Wayne Morton, the England physiotherapist, rated Butcher's chances as less than 50-50.

Butcher appeared to have established himself for the series as Mike Atherton's opening partner, making 77 of their record-breaking stand of 179 in the first innings at Edgbaston.

Should he withdraw an obvious move would be for Stewart to open. Instead the selectors have opted for James who, according to David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, has made an unanswerable case for a first cap with consistently high scores for Glamorgan over the past three seasons whereas Darren Maddy's one-day form has not been mirrored in the championship.

Potentially Maddy is a better batsman than James, whose freedom when given width tends to be offset by restriction when bowling is short of a length and straight. Test bowlers are good at exploiting such areas of weakness and neither Allan Donald nor Shaun Pollock can be relied upon to be as philanthropic as they were in Birmingham.

The loss of the captain would be a massive blow on a ground from which, lore has it, the opposition draw extra inspiration in any case. Stewart woke up yesterday morning with a spasm in his lower back - the sort of condition that necessitated John Crawley keeping wicket for a session and a half against Australia at Lord's a year ago - and took little part in the morning practice session. It is an inconvenient rather than chronic condition, however, which clears up as fast as it arrives.

Stewart confirmed that there will be no half-measures: either he is fit both to bat and keep wicket or he does neither.

That has to be wrong, for there must be an interim situation where he can do the former but not the latter; apart from keeping a world-class batsman in the game, that would also provide the natural replacement for Butcher.

The pitch, for all its typically manicured appearance, would appear to be seamer-friendly but not as quick as some Lord's pitches this season. The weather has been the problem.

Yesterday the groundsman Mick Hunt was walking around in a pair of beach shorts in an attempt, he said, to kid the sun into coming out. His preparations have been hampered by a lack of any drying weather to take moisture from the surface.

With the weather not due to perk up until the weekend, England might be tempted to go in with four seamers, omitting Robert Croft and relying on Mark Ramprakash and, should he be playing, Hick for some spin in a game where the pacemen might make all the running.

More likely, however, is that Mark Ealham will give way and that, despite Graveney's insistence that Chris Silverwood had not necessarily been brought in only as cover, Dean Headley will regain the place he lost to Gough after the winter tour.

The big call will be what to do if the toss is won. At Edgbaston, Hansie Cronje called correctly and in what ought to have been a decisive moment put England in, anticipating carnage. Instead he watched aghast for two days as they scored almost 500 runs.

Such decisions, tempting as they are at the time, go pear-shaped too often for comfort and Stewart - or Nasser Hussain, should the captain be forced to pull out - might be more reticent, bearing in mind that soft pitches where the ball has left indentations tend to produce erratic bounce when they harden up later in the game, making batting more difficult towards the end of the game.

Decisions, decisions. As Hunt said when he gazed forlornly over his soggy domain, "It's not all balloons and streamers".

England (from): M A Atherton, S P James, N Hussain, A J Stewart, G P Thorpe, M R Ramprakash, M A Ealham, R D B Croft, D G Cork, D W Headley, A R C Fraser, C E W Silverwood, M A Butcher, G A Hick, R C Russell.

South Africa (from): G Kirsten, A M Bacher, J H Kallis, D J Cullinan, W J Cronje, J N Rhodes, S M Pollock, L Klusener, M V Boucher, P R Adams, A A Donald, B M McMillan.