Quote:It now seems inevitable that, when Alastair Cook walks out to bat at Durban on Boxing Day, he will do so with his eighth opening partner since he last faced South Africa in Test cricket just over three years ago.

It is a statistic that symbolises the lack of progress England have made in the last few months. At the start of the year, we thought that England had discovered a new No. 3 in Gary Ballance. And we thought - maybe hoped is a better word - that Jos Buttler would develop into a Test-quality wicketkeeper batsman. Now both are gone, for how long it is hard to say, and the rebuilding process has returned to the foundation stage. England do not have a settled opener, a settled No. 3, a settled keeper or a spin option of which they are entirely confident.

Over the longer term, though, one man's statistics stand out quite sharply. Over the last five years, Nick Compton has averaged in excess of 50 batting in the top three in Division One of the County Championship. He has passed 1000 runs in four of those campaigns and missed it by 39 on the other occasion. Of all the realistic candidates (Ed Joyce and Chris Rogers are included in the table below as reference), his average in that period is somewhere between 10 and 12 higher. Compton is putting his hand up, all right, but it seems the selectors don't want to see him.

Hales is the most likely candidate to replace Moeen Ali at the top of the order in South Africa and there is no doubt he is a hugely talented batsman. But Hales made two of his three Championship centuries in 2015 when coming in at No. 3 and still looks as if that would be his better position. It is asking a huge amount of him to start his Test career against one of the best new-ball attacks in the game.

England made a mistake discarding Compton too early. But the best thing to do if you're heading in the wrong direction is to turn around. In Compton they have a man well-suited to forcing bowlers into second and third spells, to taking the shine off the ball and to sheltering the middle-order from the attack at its most ferocious. If the squad to South Africa is selected entirely on merit, it is hard to ignore his claims for inclusion.