Tim de Lisle: Spectre of White haunts England's search for a team to suit Asia

It's not just the players who are exhausted at the end of the home international season. The cricket writers are barely able to open their laptops. This may help to explain why England's tour parties received such a muted response. Two days after the stirring finale to the longest summer in England's history, it wasn't easy to get the juices flowing again over the question of whether the second-spinner spot should go to Gareth Batty, Jason Brown or Robert Croft.

The main party, for the two so-called Tests in Bangladesh and three in Sri Lanka, is a curious one. Since the doubt-silencing hundreds by Marcus Trescothick and Graham Thorpe at The Oval, England's top five is a sure thing, barring a sudden bout of Dhaka belly - Trescothick, Michael Vaughan, Mark Butcher, Nasser Hussain, Thorpe. In fact the top eight pick themselves - just add Andrew Flintoff, Chris Read and Ashley Giles.

That leaves the remaining seven members of the party fighting over three places. Unless Dhaka or Chittagong suddenly turns into a greentop, one spot will be for another spinner, so Batty waltzes into the starting line-up. The other two should be specialist seamers - any two from James Anderson, Matthew Hoggard and Steve Harmison, with Anderson and Hoggard favourites because they offer the full length and reverse swing that brought Darren Gough success in Sri Lanka last time.

The last three tourists may not get a look-in. They are Geraint Jones, Rikki Clarke and Paul Collingwood. Jones is a wicketkeeper who has been allowed to leapfrog James Foster because he is close to being a top-order batsman. Clarke and Collingwood are billed as all-rounders, but both are really there for their batting and fielding. Neither takes any wickets to speak of in the Championship. Their bowling is more Anthony McGrath than Glenn McGrath. Realistically, England's tour management will be picking from a party of 12, and then leaving out Harmison on the first morning.

England's thinking has been dominated by one memory from their recent tours of the subcontinent: the key part played by Craig White. When fit and firing, White was a Test-class defensive seamer, able to keep control with the old ball. On slow, dusty pitches he was also a decent batsman. In Asia, unlike the rest of the world, his batting and bowling averages were in danger of meeting: he ended up with 37 with the bat and 42 with the ball.

For years, would-be England all-rounders have been labelled "the new Botham". Duncan Fletcher is merely looking for the new White. But he may be looking in the wrong place. White was a deceptively fast bowler who could bat. Clarke is a batsman who can bowl reasonably fast but, as yet, without any cutting edge. Collingwood's bowling is dinky English one-day medium. Neither bears much resemblance to White, let alone to Flintoff, the man whose huge shoes they will be asked to fill in the event of injury.

The line-up for central contracts is even more lopsided. Eight 12-month contracts have been handed out, four of which were automatic (Trescothick, Vaughan, Butcher and Flintoff) and one not far off it, Anderson. If you had had to guess the names of the other three, it might have taken you a while. They are Hussain, a good pick now that he has recovered from the over-reaction that led him to give up the captaincy, Giles and Collingwood.

The lesson of the Chris Schofield episode - when a novice leg-spinner was given a juicy England contract and never took an international wicket - has not been learnt. Collingwood is a better player than Schofield, but he has always been a one-day specialist and, given his bias to the leg side, he may remain so. There is not the slightest need to give him a 12-month contract.

Giles, too, is an odd choice. His stock fell over the summer, and his bowling average rose: in home Tests, it is now a red-faced 60. The selectors are right to see Giles as a member of their nucleus abroad, but at home he is part of the problem: that England struggle to bowl out good teams on good pitches. Giles needs to rediscover the art of bowling at off stump. So why book him in now for next summer?

Central contracts were brought in partly to protect the fragile frames of England's young fast bowlers, but of these eight, only one is a front-line seamer.

Two parting thoughts. Gough, dropped from the one-day squad after a cup-winning spell in his last match, has been treated shoddily. He should have been the first name on the sheet for Sri Lanka, where he did as much as anyone (even Thorpe) to secure the Test series win last time. And Michael Vaughan is right: the county fixture list does need halving. What county cricket needs most is a sense of occasion, and it won't come from a 64-day first-class programme.

Tim de Lisle is editor of this year's Wisden Almanack. timdelisle62@hotmail.com