At 28, Salisbury is now mature enough to make the most of his talent and young enough to be the successful wrist spinner England have desperately sought. Flintoff is a powerful attacking batsman of confident demeanour with all-round possibilities.

They join a party of 13 for the fourth Test against South Africa, starting at Trent Bridge on Thursday, which also includes Graeme Hick, Alan Mullally and Mark Butcher.

The Warwickshire pair of Nick Knight and Ashley Giles are omitted - a matter for regret in both cases - and the two left out of the 13 at Old Trafford, Dean Headley and Ben Hollioake, have also dropped out of contention for the time being. A third Warwickshire player, Ed Giddins, came close to selection in Mullally's place and it is a shame the selectors' mood of adventure did not stretch far enough to take a chance with him.

Giddins is quick enough and swings the ball sufficiently to get good players out and an opportunity has been missed to assess his potential for the tour of Australia, quite apart from the possibility that he might have been more effective at Nottingham this week than Mullally, or other candidates like Headley, Martin Bicknell, Andrew Caddick, Peter Martin and Alex Tudor. Perhaps Tudor and Giddins will get a chance against Sri Lanka at the Oval in August.

Mullally, with 41 wickets at 18, is having an excellent season but there may be an element of wishful thinking about the gossip which suggests that he has suddenly developed an inswinger. He is the same useful but less than devastating bowler who took 28 wickets in nine Tests compared, for example, with Headley's 36 from the same number of games. If he plays in Angus Fraser's place it would be partly to create some rough on the other side of the wicket in the hope that Robert Croft will take his first wicket of the series.

Croft is lucky to be preferred to Giles, who still has much to offer and has just taken nine for 57 and scored 75 against Hampshire. It was Croft's noble match-saving innings at Manchester rather than his steady but innocuous bowling which saved his place in the 13, but the chances are that all five of the newly selected will play if the pitch looks likely to be as easy-paced as those at Trent Bridge usually are. Graham Thorpe faces a break of uncertain duration because of his slipped disc but the sooner he returns the better for England.

Flintoff is a direct replacement for Ben Hollioake as the all-rounder and his selection is based on more solid achievement this season, though 519 runs and six wickets are not earth-shattering. His experience for England's Under-19 sides and an A tour of Kenya and Sri Lanka, on which he says that he learnt much about building an innings, makes his promotion less of a gamble than it might appear.

He is a brilliant slip catcher - though he has missed some chances, too, this season because of a tendency to lose concentration - and he hits not just very hard but essentially with a straight bat. A three-wicket burst for Lancashire last week convinced the selectors that his back is now strong enough for him to be considered as the fourth seam bowler.

Salisbury and Hick have been out of the Test side for two years. Neither has fulfilled expectations in the past but in Salisbury's case there has been something of a rebirth. Contrary to speculation, he was at least as successful with the bat as he was with the ball in Australia last winter but his work with Terry Jenner, conversations with Shane Warne, and some thoughtful assessments of other leg-spinners led to small modifications to his own action and in taking 34 wickets at 18 this season, he has looked like the real thing.

Hick made no impact when the selectors chose him for the one-day internationals in the winter. Had he done so, he would almost certainly have resumed his Test career at the start of the current series but it has taken Graham Thorpe's back injury, another good season which has so far yielded him 967 runs at 56.88, and his 100th first-class century to put him back in front of John Crawley and younger rivals.

England Squad

                            Age  Tests
M A Atherton (Lancs)        30    82
M A Butcher (Surrey)        25    11
N Hussain (Essex)           30    32
*+A J Stewart (Surrey)      35    78
M R Ramprakash (Middx)      28    26
G A Hick (Worcs)            32    46
A Flintoff (Lancs)          20     0
D G Cork (Derbys)           26    22
R D B Croft (Glamorgan)     28    14
I D K Salisbury (Surrey)    28     7
D Gough (Yorks)             27    23
A R C Fraser (Middlesex)    32    41
A D Mullally (Leics)        29     9