Thorpe out of third Test

By Ted Corbett

LONDON, JULY 23. England's star left-hander Graham Thorpe was today ruled out of next week's third Test against Australia at Trent Bridge with a cracked bone in his right hand. Thorpe made a trip that he and captain Nasser Hussain have become familiar with in recent years to visit a bone specialist whose surgery lies within the shadow of Windsor Castle. The verdict is also a familiar one.

The specialist who saw Hussain on Monday a fortnight ago confirmed that Thorpe has an undisplaced fracture in his right hand. He is the only batsman England expected to provide long stable innings in the fight for the Ashes. Instead he will, at best, play in no more than one of the last three Tests.

Thorpe, who received the injury from a Brett Lee delivery on Saturday, will be out of cricket for around three weeks. The specialist's report on Thorpe is bound to give the selectors an additional headache as they are already without Michael Vaughan who has a calf injury, and skipper Nasser Hussain who also has an undisplaced fracture in the little finger of his left hand.

Hussain has had two broken fingers this summer and is not sure to be fit for the third Test although the England and Wales Cricket Board spin doctors have tried hard to convince everyone that his own three-week spell out, which ends on the day training for the Trent Bridge match begins, means he can play immediately. Thorpe's poor showing at Lord's last weekend, when he made 20 and 2, proves it is unwise to bring a batsman, however talented, back into Test cricket too quickly. The Australian fast men, and the raw Brett Lee in particular, roughed him up in the second innings before he was late on a ball and lbw. No-one doubts that he needed a couple of innings to get him back into form.

Thorpe, who was out for six weeks with a calf strain before the Lord's Test, now faces the same problem as Hussain. Three weeks from today takes England to within a few days of the fourth Test at Headingley, England's best chance of victory since the pitch is unreliable and the scene of small scores. But will it be fair to select him again for the fourth Test when he will have batted only twice - for a total of less than two hours in 10 weeks.

Add those injuries to three successive Test defeats by Pakistan and Australia, twice, and it is not difficult to imagine David Graveney, chairman of selectors, reaching for a headache powder each time his phone rings. Of his batsmen, only Michael Atherton and Mark Butcher have consistently made runs while Marcus Trescothick and Ian Ward have still not shown they can cope with this aggressive, powerful Australian attack.

Presuming that the selectors keep most of the batting intact - on the basis that they cannot make too many changes - they still have to find adequate replacements for Thorpe and possibly Hussain in the Trent Bridge match. Owais Shah of Middlesex, Nottinghamshire's Usman Afzaal and Paul Collingwood of Durham have all been given a trial without conspicuous success and as one selector said to me recently, ``the cupboard is bare. There is no-one in county cricket who is scoring such a weight of runs that he demands a place in the Test side.''

The idea of the Ashes returning to England after 12 years now seems out of question.

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