Safe yet risky

The Ashes squad is out now and my gut reaction is: they've played safe on everything – except fitness. The selectors are gambling on the health of Marcus Trescothick, Ashley Giles and James Anderson. They have picked a captain who isn't fit yet in Andrew Flintoff. My feeling is that they're right about Flintoff, narrowly, as I said here earlier. But overall, they have risked a whole bunch of half-fit players – just as they did for the last Ashes trip, in 2002, And what did everybody say then? Never again.

After this post went up, the nice people at Cricinfo asked me to expand it into a comment piece on the squad, so I did. It's here