What's the hurry?

With 81 days to go before the Ashes, England's selectors have - sensibly - allowed themselves another nine days to pick the team for the first Test against West Indies at Lord's.

Oddly, it needed an off-the-cuff comment from Ian Bell to wake them up to the fact that there was no hurry.

The first West Indies Test does not begin until May 6 which is only 33 days after the return from the Caribbean and only three weeks into the English season.

Why did they want to get so far ahead of themselves, particularly when the basis of the side is already dictated by the contract system?

For as long as I can remember the side has been chosen on a Friday evening - originally over dinner in a hotel dictated by venue of the captain's county match - and made public on Sunday morning for Tests beginning on Thursday.

Times have changed. The captain gets no more than a whisper in someone's ear ahead of selection rather than a place at the dinner table and the role of the chairman is all-important.

Cricket is still such an old-fashioned game that the meetings between Geoff Miller, the chairman, and his co-selectors Ashley Giles, until quite recently the only member of Michael Vaughan's think tank, and James Whittaker, a player and administrator all his adult life, are sometimes dictated by the venue for one of the 150 or so after-dinner speeches Miller makes annually.

There is only one question at their next meeting; how can Vaughan be shoe-horned into the side? Miller's men need his brains but they cannot find him a place unless he makes a big score in Yorkshire's first county match against Durham next week-end.

If he could get fifty or more he will be No.3 at Lord's. It would be a true irony if he sneaked in ahead of Bell who asked why the selectors needed to pick the side so early after making 172 that seemed to ensure his own place.