Flintoff Back But Headingley Factor Leaves Selectors in a Muddle

Goodbye to prudence and stability, hello to wishful thinking. Well, if it is good enough for New labor, it is good enough for English cricket. After a record six Tests with an unchanged side, England ran slap bang into the unpredictability of Headingley. And Gordon Brown thinks he is unfortunate to have to deal with rising oil and food prices.

Just the thought of Headingley makes fools of wise men. A Test side that had been unchanged for six matches, and successful enough with it, suddenly had Tim Ambrose batting at No6 and Darren Pattinson - yes THE Darren Pattinson, the lad from Grimsby who has not been seen around for a while - turning up for his England debut after 11 first-class matches. Tim Ambrose is not a Test No6 in any circumstances and certainly not when the ball is careering around.

Pattinson, before his call-up, had planned to spend the day at an outdoor theme park, chasing an adrenalin rush on a nerve-racking roller coaster. Instead he made his Test debut at Headingley. No change there then.

This was another Leeds Test, answerable to nothing but its own black magic and with enough sullen clouds to suggest that it might turn into a water park at any minute. After the boredom of Lord's it perked everybody up. Then when South Africa batted, the sun came out and batting became easier; that is the advantage of calling yourself the Rainbow Nation.

It was conceivable that yesterday men dressed as women, or the Incredible Hulk, sat and debated the pressing moral question of whether a cricketer born in Grimsby but raised as a loyal Aussie had the right to represent the country of his birth. They did this while players born in South Africa and Australia came and went with disturbing regularity. It used to come down to birthright; now people talk of upbringing. There is no solution.

However much the selectors will deny it, he was a Headingley hunch. Neil Mallender, the third umpire here, was another. Sixteen years ago he made his debut at 30 and took eight wickets in a defeat of Pakistan. He managed one more Test. It might be one more than Pattinson manages.

The last thing England needed was a dodgy umpiring decision to help South Africa on their way. Alastair Cook was strangled down the leg-side, the ball brushing his thigh so clearly that Mark Boucher did not appeal; Morne Morkel, the bowler, did and found agreement from Billy Bowden.

An experiment had been planned in this series which would have allowed players to make a limited number of appeals to the TV umpire. It was abandoned because England's players were uncomfortable with the idea of challenging the on-field umpire's authority. They have been 'rewarded' with three faulty decisions in two innings. Andrew Strauss got a bad lbw decision from Daryl Harper at Lord's and Paul Collingwood's Test career has been put on ice because Bowden adjudged him caught off his pad. But they are right, however much it hurts.

After Pattinson had bowled an undistinguished new-ball spell the pitch was invaded, as if in protest, by a hayrick-haired man with a ploughman's gait. It looked for all the world like Matthew Hoggard and, if it was, his pace has dropped more than we thought. If he suspected that his Test career was over, it is now.

Andrew Flintoff: now there's an Englishman. "Cry God for England, Harry and St George" and all that malarkey might not represent much of a solution to qualification ills in mobile, multicultural England, but at least it keeps it simple.

Flintoff's Test return brought him 17 runs and a wicket and the outside chance of replacing Dwain Chambers at Beijing. He sprinted to the middle so quickly that he was taking guard by the time Ambrose had left the field. He was batting at No7, so he had license to attack, but 123 for five was not quite what England had in mind. He clumped his second ball through gully at catchable height and added three more boundaries in the same arc before throwing the bat and edging behind.

The 2008 Yorkshire Yearbook carries a reminder that England have always been unnerved by Headingley. Captain CB Fry, in his autobiography, tells that things weren't much better in the Golden Era. "Leeds has always been unlucky for us," he said. "In 1921 Jack Hobbs developed appendicitis and there it was that Johnny Briggs went off his head and never played again. So you see what Leeds is like? I now, invariably, stay in Harrogate."