England Cricket / Andrew Hughes / 27 December 2007 /

Andrew Hughes selects the men to get the national team back on track...

The English cricket menu used to resemble a leisurely five-course meal, a chance to take in the flavour of a different cricketing culture over the duration of a long, slow summer. But the modern schedule is more like a crowded lunchtime buffet, with the guests continually on the move and the plates emptied before you've had a chance to digest. So before we tackle next year's Christmas pudding, we will have had two hearty helpings of New Zealand, a big dollop of South Africa, the standing dish that is the ICC Trophy and a steaming plate full of India, all accompanied by lashings of 50 and 20-over stuff.

But for the time being, there is no sign of the merry-go-round slowing. And the next 12 months represent a crucial time frame for English cricket. After the torpor of Sri Lanka, some of the tabloids were dusting off the old headlines from the late 1980s. It is not hard to envisage home and away defeats to Vettori's men leading to the sacking of everyone from the coach to the coach driver before Royal Ascot. In order to avoid a remake of the 'classic' English comedy Carry on Cricket (1988) there are three men in particular we need to come to the party.

Freddie Flintoff, red-eyed reveller, amateur sailor, bowling colossus and heart of the England team is currently out in the wilderness, either just about to have surgery or having just had surgery or perhaps both. Whatever you think of his decision to submit his ankle to the probe of the surgeon's knife for a fourth time rather than tinker with his bowling action, there is a Freddie-sized hole in the England team and none of the selection of ugly sisters on offer can fill his capacious glass boot. At some point in the next 12 months a decision on the balance of the team is needed because without Freddie, we don't have the bowling firepower to play only four specialists. It will be happily ever after if he returns, fit and well. But how many England cricket fans still believe in fairy stories?

Though Matthew Hoggard will once more be putting shoulder to plough, his bowling performances will not define 2008. That role goes to Monty Panesar on whom the full spotlight will fall this year. A few months back he was auditioning for the role of the next Bishan Bedi, but in Sri Lanka his was a walk-on part, no longer the next big thing. His well-oiled action and level headedness are no longer considered virtues but callow flaws. He is too mechanical it is said; he isn't a thinker, they hint; he is too easily domineered by his captain; he should be more attacking; he should spin it more; he should vary his flight more; he should set his own fields, he should learn more variations; he should concentrate on doing what he does. The suggestions swarm about him and he needs to listen to the right people, having first established which are the right people. It is bewildering for an earnest young man such as Monty but the advice he takes in the next 12 months will determine what sort of bowler he becomes and whether England have a chance of taking twenty wickets in a Test match on a regular basis.

Kevin Pietersen on the other hand needs to listen to no one but the inner voice that propels him to those rubber-limbed exhibitions of magic and astonishment. Pietersen on-song scares the bowlers to death, believeing he can whisk any ball they care to offer in any direction he chooses. England's most marketable player is England's best batsman, the only one capable of mixing it with Kallis, with the best of the Aussies, with the Indian Galacticos. As highlighted previously in this column, reports of his decline in Test cricket have been greatly exaggerated, but these things can become self-fulfilling. A confidence player if ever there was one, without a sub-continental pitch in sight until the autumn, he needs to fill his boots in the first half of the year.

And who knows, if Freddie returns, if Monty gets his groove back and KP racks up the centuries, 2008 could just be a year to remember.

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