Collingwood Has One More Chance to Prove Selectors Right

"If it were done, when 'tis done then 'were well it were done quickly". Thus spoke one harassed leader. Macbeth had the odd crisis of confidence. The same must apply to Michael Vaughan. But if you are going to fail with the bat you might as well do it quickly.

Vaughan can't be sure whether he is in form or not. He wasn't in long enough to find out. Paul Collingwood knows. And so does everyone else - except perhaps the selectors and Vaughan.

Slow failures are the worst. I remember Chris Tavare scoring an excruciating 14 at Lord's against Sri Lanka at the end of the 1984 summer. As a result he was omitted from the winter tour party. A quick duck and he would have probably made it.

In the past seriously out of form batsmen, great ones, have informed the selectors that they would rather not be picked. Geoff Boycott did it: so did Graham Gooch. That is not Collingwood's way. He would never allow himself to be seen taking a backward step and in his heart of hearts he may recognize that he is not good enough to pick and choose when he plays.

So when the selectors say plough on, Collingwood ploughs on. That takes courage on his part; it may also require some stupidity on the part of those picking the team, who prefer not to trust the evidence of their own eyes, but cling to the notion that Collingwood is a "fighter", "good in the dressing room". He is both of those things, but runs in the bank are what really count (he now has 43 Test runs in six innings this summer).

Twenty or 30 years ago getting dropped was an occupational hazard. It happened frequently and there were no peripheral elements like the possession of a central contract or the one-day captaincy to complicate matters. Now being dropped seems to be regarded as a cataclysmic event - especially for batsmen. The right balance lies somewhere in between.

There should be no disgrace in being dropped. Nor should the experience be terminal for the man in question. Gower, Gooch, Gatting, Boycott, Atherton were all dropped and all came back stronger. But the longer the rope you give a batsman - like Collingwood - the longer he has to wait to come back. He would never admit this but Collingwood might have been better served if he had been dropped earlier in the summer.

We know that Vaughan was keen to have Collingwood in this side. That was made clear when Geoff Miller clarified the protocol before this match. He gives the captain and coach the squad of 13; the captain and coach choose the final 11.

Vaughan rates Collingwood; he trusts him. But there is a subtext, probably a subconscious one as far as Vaughan is concerned. It goes something like this: "I'm not scoring any runs at the top of the order and I'm playing this game. So is it fair that I should drop Colly down the order? We can't have one rule for me, one for him". So Collingwood plays. At Edgbaston he has just one more chance to justify the faith of Vaughan and to bring a smile to the faces of the selectors - for the first time in a fortnight.