Who Makes Way As Bowlers' Toil Leaves Return of Flintoff Inevitable?

English cricket tends not to deal in certainties but one of the few that exists may now be set in stone. The squad for Friday's second Test at Headingley is due to be named at the end of this game and, if there was the slightest doubt before yesterday's events that Andrew Flintoff would be inked in with a selectorial flourish, there can surely be none after them.

Not until 5.28pm, when Graeme Smith made a hash of a pull against the second new ball, did the England attack offer a hint of a counter-argument, and not even Saturday's heroics could obscure the reality: Flintoff's 18-month absence from Test cricket is about to come to an end.

As the bowlers ran into two brick walls of South African defiance and a sixth successive Test draw at Lord's began to take shape in English minds, Flintoff's virtues seemed to expand by the over. Chief among them is his ability to flog life out of the most rigorously dry-cleaned shirt-front and, if his strike-rate of a victim every 64 balls in Test cricket is a minor quibble for a bowler of his pace, then there is no statistical measure of the wickets he earns for colleagues at the other end. Play he must. The only question - and it is not one the selectors will relish making after naming the same side in the last six Tests - is who makes way.

Concern over his batting, which has yielded only two fifties in all cricket for Lancashire this summer, may encourage Geoff Miller and friends to stick to their current policy of a four-man attack plus Paul Collingwood's dobbers, in which case Stuart Broad could be rewarded for a Test-best 76 on Friday with a sheepish au revoir. But the 204-run partnership by Smith and Neil McKenzie as South Africa followed on in a Test match for the first time in over three years - not to mention a worrying recurrence of Ryan Sidebottom's back niggle which has so far limited him to 18 overs in the second innings - is likely to have tipped the scales in favour of adding another prong.

The general wisdom was that Ian Bell's 199 had condemned Collingwood, sawn off by Billy Bowden, to a spell on the sidelines. But, if there is a genuine worry about batting Flintoff at his preferred position of No6, then another option remains open: recall Matt Prior, who is averaging 61 in the county championship for Sussex, and bat Flintoff at No7 instead.

It is a move the selectors will be loth to make, given the apparently endless changes behind the stumps since the retirement of Alec Stewart five years ago, but Tim Ambrose did his cause few favours in the recent NatWest Series defeat by New Zealand and he has not covered himself in glory here. He followed a tame first-innings dismissal by dropping Smith off the captain's old nemesis Kevin Pietersen and was presumably relieved when Smith fell to Anderson soon after.

Measuring the overall worth of a wicket-keeper is a notoriously tricky business and Ambrose's supporters will point to game-turning innings in Wellington and at Trent Bridge, both against New Zealand. They may also have noted recent research in The Wisden Cricketer magazine which reveals that Prior has so far cost England more runs in byes and missed chances than he has actually scored with the bat. But since Flintoff's return feels like a non-negotiable, the selectors may be tempted to make another sacrifice to accommodate their talisman.

How England could have done with Flintoff's bruising indefatigability yesterday. In their last six Tests at Lord's, including this one, England have run up first-innings scores of 551 for six, 528 for nine, 553 for five, 298, 319 and 593 for eight, only to have been thwarted by dropped catches (against Sri Lanka in 2006), a conservative declaration (Pakistan later that year), rain (West Indies in 2007), poor umpiring (India, also in 2007), Jacob Oram (New Zealand in May) and now, possibly, some good old-fashioned South African grit.

But the tell-tale common denominator has been a Lord's pitch that has demanded that bit extra from its bowlers. Without Flintoff, Michael Vaughan may be wondering whether it has demanded too much. There was a time when England, oppressed by tradition rather than inspired, dreaded playing here. But under Duncan Fletcher they won as many Lord's Tests - eight - as they had done in the 25 years before him.

If South Africa wriggle free today, it will continue a trend of five-day stalemates, which will please the administrators more than anyone and which yesterday contrived to add to the stature of Flintoff.