Fletcher's Bothamesque flaw

Ian Botham was in Delhi the other day, surveying the wreckage of another England collapse. He had a beef about the fact that they had made some changes to their squad after the Test series. "The best teams in the world don't make a lot of changes," Botham remarked. "We do." There were two problems with this. Botham was breaking one of Richie Benaud's rules of commentary - "There is no such word as `we'." But he can be forgiven for that, because he was such a wholehearted player for England that expecting him to embrace neutrality would be like asking him to go teetotal.

The bigger problem was that it's just not true. Look at Australia, the world's best one-day team by an embarrassing distance. They have a different opening pair from the Test team: neither Matthew Hayden nor Justin Langer is now wanted in pyjamas. Adam Gilchrist is a fixture, despite his faltering form, and he is joined by Simon Katich, who seems an odd choice but makes plenty of fifties. In the middle order, the Aussies bring in Michael Clarke, who can't get into the Test team at the moment. And Shane Warne, the biggest, baddest figure in the Test side, doesn't bother with one-day cricket any more; his place goes to either an extra seamer or Brad Hogg. So that's four changes every time. During their home season it was five, as Damien Martyn was rusticated from the Test side.

Something similar happens to most countries. If they all just picked their Test team, several distinguished one-day careers would never have taken place: Neil Fairbrother, Yuvraj Singh, Nick Knight, Chris Harris, and above all Michael Bevan, who was a colossus in yellow and a pygmy in white. Mark Waugh would not have been an opener, nor would Sachin Tendulkar. Dean Jones would have had to marshal run chases from number five, not three. Anil Kumble would currently be an automatic choice for India, Warne would not have been allowed to semi-retire, and Darren Gough would never have been seen again after being savaged by Graeme Smith in his last two Tests in 2003.

Selectors pick partly different teams because Test and one-day cricket are partly different games. Some of the players master both forms, others don't. Commentators tend to have been star players themselves, and to have found it irritating when anyone suggested they were better at one form than the other. Botham himself was such a titan in Tests that he was regarded as an automatic pick for the one-day team, where he usually underperformed. At his best, he was just as irresistible as in Tests, but he never took a five-for or made a hundred, and he ended up with his career averages the wrong way round - 23 for batting, 28 for bowling. In 1987, amazingly, he opted to miss the World Cup. Even more amazingly, nobody thought much of it.

Certain countries might think about having separate coaches for one-day cricket. Duncan Fletcher's record is now Bothamesque: god-like in Tests, all too mortal in one-day internationals. Lately he has been making several mistakes each time he writes out the one-day team sheet - picking too few spinners, too many wicketkeepers, and not enough shaggy-haired, lion-hearted swing bowlers who are in the form of their lives.

We could also do with partly different teams for Twenty20. So far, the world's selectors have been doggedly unimaginative, treating the 20-over game as if it were just a twin of its much older sister. And while we're at it, let's have different commentary teams too. By this stage of an English winter, the voices of the Sky commentators have all merged into a single drone.

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The ICC Champions' Trophy 2006 is still six months away, and already it has begun to go awry. It is happening at the wrong time (it should be years away from the World Cup, not months), in the wrong place (the Indian board wants it abolished), with the wrong format. The West Indies, current champions, face the dreary and insulting task of proving that they are better than Zimbabwe and Bangladesh before they are allowed to defend the title. The tournament will take too long and matter too little. ICC can be congratulated on moving swiftly towards a Twenty20 World Cup, but it should be replacing the Champions' Trophy, not joining it in a blatantly overcrowded calendar.

England have got lucky: they don't have to qualify, and being in the same group as Australia and India (whose home advantage was more than the seeding system could cope with), they have no realistic chance of reaching the semi-finals, so they can have a much-needed week off before the Ashes.