Our batsmen have fared well of late and have not suffered from injuries (expect Trott) so we don't know if we have any good ones or not.
Do you think we should rest Trott regardless just for one test, so we can have a look at say Taylor?

I take it Carberry won't be seen again in a England shirt?

Carberry has only just recovered from a life threateng lung condition. He is also the wrong side of 30 years old now.

Ginger, no if Trott is fit I wouldn't rest him for an untried newcomer, this series is too important, but I would like to see opportunities created in the ODI series for others.

I agree to an extent Hope, i do feel we have a large stable of bowlers, some with test experience but the batting whilst hugely talented does lack experience at the top level. However unlike west indies after they were number 1 and to a lesser extent Australia, we do have a lot of talent waiting in the wings, Shiv Takor who we have been hearing about for about 3 years has broken into the first team at at Grace Road and is one to look out for and he is amongst some very very talented 17 yr olds playing. The talent is there just as you rightly point out, lacking in experience. It's a difficult balance to get right, but as you say, ODI's are not a bad place to blood people.

Taylor should be in at 6 now. Morgan is there.
Then in reserve: Hales, Stokes, Patel and Hildreth.
With further down the line: Wells, Root, Bairstow, Kieswetter, Vince etc.

Agreed though, they need to get Taylor at least in there for experience - I thought this should have happened last year against Bangladesh.

It's not just the experience of playing, it's the experience of being in the same dressing room with the top players and training with them under the watchful eye of Andy Flower.

Agreed, my point was I wanted Taylor to go to Bangladesh to understand the Sub Continent wicket and culture.

When one looks at the future tours program for England, it must surely dawn on the selectors that having a choice of only six batsmen for tests is inadequate.
They simply have to find ways to bring others into the fold the way they have with bowlers.

Lions games are a hell of a lot closer to test cricket than limited overs stuff.

As Morgan is painfully learning, being a batting genius in the shorter format is really no grounding at all for test success.

I would turn your point on its head. Why do we have so few good specialist limited overs batsmen that we're burning out our test batsmen playing them in a slog-athon form of the game?

T20, ODI and Tests are 3 distinct forms of the game. The first two are not, or should not be, stepping stones to test cricket. They are objectives in their own right, with their own skill sets and there own mental challenges.

It is a truely rare batsman - a Viv Richards or a Sachin Tendulkar say, who can genuinely excel in each form of cricket.

I think one of India's current problems Dravid apart, is that too much slogathon cricket has damaged their batsmen's ability - mental just as much as technique - to play a long innings. As T20 increasingly dominates the longer forms of the limited overs game, the gap between test and T20 cricket is going to become ever more marked.

It will be asking for trouble, even more than it is today, to regard limited overs cricket as the proving-ground for test players.

By all means try to find ways of giving Lions games more intensity and meaning, but don't lose focus on the fundamental fact that the best way to develop batsmen who will prosper in the long form of the game is for them to play the long form.