da apostebet： LONDON – England today recalled batsman Mark Ramprakash as an injurycover for left-hander Graham Thorpe in a 14-man squad named for thefirst Ashes cricket Test against Australia starting at Edgbaston onThursday
Ihithisham Kamardeen01-Jul-2001LONDON – England today recalled batsman Mark Ramprakash as an injurycover for left-hander Graham Thorpe in a 14-man squad named for thefirst Ashes cricket Test against Australia starting at Edgbaston onThursday.Thorpe, England’s most successful batsman during the winter in Pakistanand Sri Lanka and in the two Tests against Pakistan, is very doubtfulfor the game because of a lingering calf muscle injury.England will be strengthened by the availability of skipper NasserHussain, who has recovered from a broken thumb, allrounder Craig White,left-arm spinner Ashley Giles and maybe Thorpe, who missed theTri-Nations one-day series.While Hussain missed the second Test defeat against Pakistan at OldTrafford and then the one-dayers, White and Giles both missed thetwo-Test series and the one-dayers due to long-suffering injuries.Giles, England’s series-winning bowler in Pakistan last year, has beenhampered by a sore Achilles tendon.Also causing a headache for the selectors is Michael Vaughan’s knee cystwhich ruled him out of the last one-dayer against Australia at The Oval.”We currently have injury concerns about three players, Michael Vaughan,Ashley Giles and Graham Thorpe,” said chairman of selectors DavidGraveney.”Graham is the most serious concern at present and we will need to checkthe fitness of all three players at Edgbaston.”While the selectors did consider the worst case scenario in relation toinjuries, we have decided to call up only one extra player as cover atthis stage. We will review the situation, however, once the players areat Edgbaston and their injuries have been assessed by (physiotherapist)Dean Conway.”Mark Ramprakash is an experienced test player with a good recordagainst Australia and he has been in excellent form for his county thisseason. We feel he represents the best option as a cover player giventhe doubts about Graham’s fitness.”Ramprakash, 31, played the last of his 42 Tests against the West Indiesat Lord’s last year before losing his place with scores of 18, 0, 0 and2 in the first two Tests when he opened the batting.But in eight Tests against Australia, the right-hander, who moved thisseason from Middlesex to Surrey, has scored 615 runs at an average of43.93 inclusive of six half centuries.In all he has scored 1,796 runs at an average of 26.41 with a solitarycentury against the West Indies at Barbados in 1998 when he score 154runs.England has failed to beat Australia in the last seven Ashes seriessince winning it under Mike Gatting’s captaincy in the 1986-87 series inAustralia. Despite winning four series in a row, it was held 1-1 byPakistan and confidence going into the Ashes tests is low after a poorperformance in the one-dayers when the team lost all six games againstAustralia and Pakistan.England squad: Nasser Hussain (captain), Michael Atherton, MarcusTrescothick, Michael Vaughan, Graham Thorpe, Alec Stewart, Ian Ward,Craig White, Mark Ramprakash, Dominic Cork, Ashley Giles, Andy Caddick,Darren Gough and Matthew Hoggard.