My assessment of our batters:

Burns – our best player at the moment.
Roy – his technique isn’t tight enough for red ball cricket. But does have star quality so maybe worth a place down the order.
Root – should bat at 3
Denly – another Vince, looks good for a while.
Butler – looks a walking wicket at the moment
Stokes – Perhaps should bat at 4 and get his head down.
Bairstow – a class player who lacks recent runs.
Woakes – probably has a better technique than all of or top 5 bar Root.

Sibley will be in next time round. Not sure he will do any better but doesn’t lack patience. You could easily drop Roy, Denly and Butler, but lack of alternatives will mean that probably they won’t. Sam Curran averages over 30 with the bat. He has scored runs when under pressure. He hasn’t scored bucket loads of runs in first class cricket, but sometimes you just have the temperament for test cricket. At present he can’t do worse than the others. So how about:

Burns
Sibley
Root
Stokes
Roy
Bairstow
Woakes
Curran

Haven't been following it much but mystified by Denly's inclusion. Seems to have been about for ages as a good player but surprised he made the Test team. What happened to the likes of Hameed, Livingstone, Clarke, Lawrence?

His scores this summer : 23,10,18,11,30.

I am sick of Steve Smith. Get Archer to bowl some bollock high beamers and take that stupid look off his face.

Red and Blue Army!

Cracking days play yesterday. One of, if not the best day of test cricket I’ve seen.

If England can pull out a win from here, that Archer spell could prove to be the turning point of the Ashes. Jorfa’s gonna be all over Smith from now on and he seems to have found a chink in his armour. I don’t fancy Smith with the bat today, his arm will be in terrible shape.

If we can get Anderson fit, we’ll have a real selection headache. I’d have to go with 6 bowlers.

Re Denly, although he’s not a big score, he’s had 2 crucial partnerships with Burns this match. Both potentially match winners. He deserves his place in the team at present.

The biggest problem is that Palace kick off at 2. What do we watch?!

I don’t see why we would persist with both Roy and Buttler. Smashing a quick 40 is important in T20 but not often in a five day game. In any case Stokes is a dasher so why do we need three of them?