If England picked a 16-man Test squad to tour Australia, with everyone fit and available, Ronnie Irani would not have a cat's chance in hell of making the cut. But that doesn't matter now, because if Irani makes the final XI at The Oval, he has a real chance to present an unanswerable case for an Ashes tour place. A year ago it seemed about as likely as South Korea reaching the semi-finals of the World Cup, but Ronnie Irani could be fronting up to Glenn McGrath at Brisbane on November 7. The Oval has traditionally staged the last Test of the summer - it's done so every year since 1984 - and has a rich recent history of players being recalled or called up just in time to book some employment for the winter.

Often the men in question haven't needed to do that much. The selectors saw enough in Jimmy Ormond's 1 for 115 against Australia last year, for example, to take him to India and New Zealand, though they might have regretted it when his svelte frame was exposed by a Guardian photographer.

And Mark Ramprakash booked winter tours to the West Indies after a couple of decent, but hardly spectacular, performances against Australia in 1993 (6 and 64) and 1997 (4 and 48), although the 48, on a dog of a pitch, was a crucial innings in a match England won by only 19 runs.

In fact, that 1993 vintage contained five players coming from nowhere to book a tour place: Graeme Hick larruped 80 and 36 with a swagger rarely seen at Test level, Steve Watkin took six important wickets (and never played a Test again), Angus Fraser returned after two-and-a-half injury-plagued years to take eight wickets, win the Man-of-the-Match award and relaunch his career, and Devon Malcolm, who hadn't played all summer, put the heebie-jeebies up a hardened Australian top six that had sauntered through the summer in a blaze of 600-plus totals.

Malcolm's love of the Oval is well-documented - he'd missed the previous four Tests when he came back to demolish South Africa in 1994 - and so is Phil Tufnell's. Tufnell's two Oval seven-fors, against West Indies in 1991 and Australia in 1997, were both on recall, though the Windies match was the last Test of the series but not the summer.

Tufnell, however, has seen both sides of the coin. Last year he was recalled against the Aussies, and was thumped all over the place in a calculated assault. Figures of 1 for 174 left Tufnell's Test career with nowhere to go, and England were so keen not to pick him for India that they even turned to Martyn Ball.

It's as easy to stuff up a career as forge one if you are given a chance in the Oval Test, as Alan Butcher (1979), Paul Parker (1981), Steve James (1998), Ben Hollioake (1998), Alan Wells (1995) and John Stephenson (1989) would confirm. All played their last Tests at The Oval, having been recalled or called-up. The often giddy, end-of-term atmosphere of the summer's final Test makes it easier for the selectors to forget their mistakes, like a drunken one-night stand being erased from the memory.

Irani himself seemed to have played his final Test when he came back against New Zealand in 1999 and did absolutely nothing apart from wind-up the opposition. Instead, he will look to follow the example of another mulleted allrounder - Ian Botham, who returned in 1991 after a two-year absence, smacked the winning runs against the West Indies, and earnt himself one last fling as an England player.

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