How not to treat a keeper

When the curtain rises again on the Ashes, there will be only a couple of characters more central than the England wicketkeeper. Yet we don’t know who it will be, and today, when they could have shed some light on this, the England hierarchy spread further doubt. They handed out annual contracts to 13 players without including either of their touring keepers. Geraint Jones has lost his contract, but Chris Read hasn’t been given one.

So when England take the field at Brisbane, one man will be getting paid less, and offered less security, than nearly all his team-mates, and it will be the man whose role is to be the hub of everything they do. You get the nasty feeling that Duncan Fletcher, a Jones fan, is having second thoughts about switching to Read, even though he has done a great job since his surprise recall seven weeks ago. Read, whose last two Test series have both ended in 3-0 victories – against West Indies in 2004, and now Pakistan – is being treated as a poor relation.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, Michael Vaughan and Simon Jones will still be on full pay. Vaughan is an outstanding captain and Jones a matchwinning bowler, but they have now been out for nine and 12 months respectively, and here they are being signed up for another year, at somewhere between £250,000 and £400,000 each.

Loyalty is all very well but England have reached the point where loyalty meets profligacy. They are behaving as if they were a club, and there was a danger of Vaughan or Jones joining a rival team. Yet when there really was such a danger, with the excellent bowling coach Troy Cooley, England did nothing, and he left to join Australia.

The 13-strong list has a strange balance, big on batsmen (seven) and spinners (two), short on fast bowlers (four, none currently fit) as well as keepers. And, like the tour party, it is huge on injuries, with Ashley Giles included as well as Vaughan, Simon Jones, Flintoff and Trescothick. You can see why the selectors didn’t have enough confidence in Saj Mahmood or Liam Plunkett to give them a contract. What is harder to fathom is how they did have enough confidence in some of the others.