By Andy Wilson
Sam Robson will split the Yorkshire opening partnership of Adam Lyth and Alex Lees when England Lions launch their South African tour with a three-day game against a Gauteng Invitation XI which starts in Soweto on Monday.
Lees drops to number three to allow Robson to open up with Lyth, leaving the captain Jonathan Trott to come in at four, James Vince at five and Jonny Bairstow to keep wicket and bat six.
There were further tricky decisions for the coach Mark Robinson and the rest of his selection team after that, with room in the XI for only four of the six fast bowlers in the 15-man squad, and for one of the two spinners.
Liam Plunkett , Boyd Rankin , Jack Brooks and Mark Wood will form a tasty-looking pace attack, with Adil Rashid playing as a leg-spinning all-rounder.
That means disappointment for Craig Overton , Matthew Dunn and the Kent pair of Sam Billings and Adam Riley , especially as Robinson has been open with the players and public alike that this selection was made with the first of the two four-day matches against South Africa A in mind.
The Lions are treating those as Tests, and after a recce of the facilities at the ground on the University of Johannesburg’s Soweto campus, Robinson said: “We’re looking to get everybody further down the line and hopefully ready to hit the first ‘Test’ match hard.
“Practice was a bit curtailed yesterday because of the weather but we managed to get out on grass today and the next stage is playing a game, getting competitive.
“We’ve picked a team that is as near as we can imagine to the team that’s going to be playing in the first ‘Test’ match, subject to injuries. The turnaround is quite quick, we’ve only got this one warm-up game, so it’s just about getting people ready to hit that match hard.
“It was a difficult selection for all those reasons. We viewed the work done in Sri Lanka and South Africa before Christmas as the development stage of the winter, so now we move on to performance, and the last measure we had of performance and form comes from last summer, so that has been a key factor in our thinking.”
It means this Lions team can boast five Test cricketers who share a total of 84 caps, in addition to a sixth in Rashid who has played one-day and Twenty20 international cricket, albeit in his case more than five years ago.
England Lions (v Gauteng Invitation XI): Lyth (Yorkshire), Robson (Middlesex), Lees (Yorkshire), Trott (Warwickshire, capt), Vince (Hampshire), Bairstow (Yorkshire, wk), Rashid (Yorkshire), Plunkett (Yorkshire), Wood (Durham), Rankin (Warwickshire), Brooks (Yorkshire).
