Alec Stewart, who was replaced by Nasser Hussain as England captain after the World Cup last summer, will lead England in their match against a Gauteng XI in Lenasia today. But Hussain is merely resting, and other selections are more noteworthy with the second Test beginning on December 9th in Port Elizabeth.
Quite why the international teams director of the England and Wales Cricket Board agreed to a one-day knockabout at this stage of the tour is anyone's guess, but it gives a rare opportunity for Darren Maddy, Chris Read, Graeme Swann and Chris Silverwood to stretch their limbs.
Read and Swann have played only one match on tour, the wicketkeeper out first ball in the one-day game against Easterns and Swann making three and taking a single wicket in the same match, and Maddy has played twice, in the pipe-opener against the Oppenheimer side and in Cape Town against Western Province-Boland, scoring only four runs in total. Silverwood, the replacement for Dean Headley who went home last week because of injury, has yet to take the field.
Most significant of the selections are Silverwood and Alex Tudor, for there is certain to be a bowling place up for grabs in the second Test. Tudor's promise of last winter seems to have evaporated, temporarily at least, and as yet he does not look sufficiently fit after the knee injury that sidelined him for the rest of the summer after his batting heroics in the first Test against New Zealand at Edgbaston.
The selectors have a difficult situation with him, for clearly he is a bowler who needs overs in the middle rather than net practice to find his rhythm, and yet they cannot afford to indulge this at the expense of preparing the main players for the Test.
Already Tudor appears to have dropped down the pecking order, with Silverwood increasingly looking as if he will come into the squad for Port Elizabeth with a good chance of adding to his previous cap - gained in Zimbabwe three years ago - perhaps at the expense of Alan Mullally but more likely Gavin Hamiton. One-day game it may be, but for these Test pretenders this is a bowl-out.
In returning to Stewart as temporary captain, the England selectors and the tour management committee of Hussain, Phil Tufnell, Darren Gough and Mark Butcher have bypassed other candidates.
It is possible that Mike Atherton could have done it had he been playing, although he would have been reluctant; despite his two ducks at the Wanderers, he is enjoying his cricket more now that he is no longer in charge.
More pertinently, Butcher, who is playing today, captained England at Old Trafford in the third Test against New Zealand last summer in the absence of the injured Hussain.
Gauteng, captained by Clive Eksteen, will be choosing from a squad of 13 but seem certain to include the Northerns player Rudi Bryson and the two blackplayers involved with him in the discordant musical chairs of Centurion, the promising batsman Geoffrey Toyana and the fast bowler Walter Masimula, plus two Lenasia teenagers, Ashpak Abowath and Bharat Parashotam.
ENGLAND: D Maddy (Leics), M Butcher (Surrey), A Flintoff (Lancs), C Adams (Sussex), A Stewart (Surrey, capt), M Vaughan (Yorks), G Swann (Northants), C Read (Notts, wkt), A Tudor (Surrey), C Silverwood (Yorks), D Gough (Yorks).
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