Of course, let's treat test cricket as a finishing school for underprepared youngsters.
Read, Foster and Pothas are the finished article. Solid with the gloves and solid with the bat. Read's batting is massively underrated and is still suffering for *that* dismissal by Chris Cairns nearly 10 years ago. Read did decently with the bat against Pakistan; much better than Prior has managed against India and he was hardly the only batsman to come unstuck against Australia. How quickly people forget your successes when you've had one or two embarrassing failures. Also, would we still be having this debate if James Foster hadn't broken his arm after coming back from a relatively successful tour of India and NZ - averaging 25 with the bat after only one season of first class cricket and in some of the toughest conditions for a youngster to start a test career was fantastic. Its a shame he never got the chance to prove himself in English conditions in 2002.
I don't agree, TBH - Foster was at that time a semi-decent, gutsy lower-order batsman. Alec Stewart, on the other hand, was (as he always was) a proven class top-order batsman. What's more, he was
still one of if not the best wicketkeeper in the country. It'd have been a travesty if Stewart's career was ended by a (at that time) pretty well nothing player in Foster. I'm really, seriously wondering if we'd not be better with him still playing, 4 years after he was hounded (prematurely, IMO) into retirement.
Nonetheless, Foster has undoubtedly merited another go and if I had been told "it's between Prior and Foster" at the start of the summer, I'd have gone for Foster as, despite his inferior overall careeer record, he's clearly IMO the better batsman (and gloveman from all reports too).
As to Read, his is a tricky situation. No, he wasn't alone in failing in Australia, but it's
not just the events of 1999 that have counted against him, those of 2003 and 2004 are far more significant. Read should never, ever have been playing in 1999, he was 20 years old, had barely been in Notts' first-team a season, and it was insane to waste Stewart's all-round capabilities. In 2003 and 2004, on the other hand, he had been talked-up by near enough everyone as the reason Stewart had to go (which was, I said at the time, stupid as Read will clearly never be the batsman Stewart was) and clearly did deserve his chance. Yet even in Geraint Jones' darkest days, he still looked (if not performed) better than Read. I honestly can't ever see Read making the grade in Tests, though I still feel (as I have since the first game after the 2003 WC) that he's the best man for the job in ODIs.
As for Pothas, he should have been in the team at the start of the summer IMO. Nonetheless, he's not getting any younger and I think his time's probably passed.
Prior is an also-ran. He was average against Zimbabwe in those ODIs several years back and to my eyes, he's hardly improved since.
Scoring 35 in your single innings? Neither here nor there IMO, and in any case I made precisely no judgement whatsoever based on the happenings of that series, or any other against Zimbabwe of late.
His dismissal in the 1st innings at the Oval was characteristic of someone lacking in the mental toughness to fight it out when his team's back is against the wall and illustrates for me that he's only good enough to be considered a fairweather batsman who'll only score when the going is exceptionally easy. It doesn't help his cause either that there's the 'nepotistic' (not the right word, granted, but I don't know the equivalent for county bias) Sword of Damacles hanging over his head which fans of other counties will always hold against him.
But don't let that give you the idea that I rate Prior's batting - I never have and a good series against West Indies did not convince me.
You're kidding, surely? This is a man who took the wicketkeeping gloves almost every Test between the end of 1996 and the end of his career in 2003, and scored runs almost without fail. IIRR he averaged around 39 as wicketkeeper-batsman (and something everso slightly higher as opener-and-non-keeper) once he made the position his own, which is a marvellous effort.
