No one will await the announcement today of the England team for the first-class leg of the tour to Sri Lanka with greater concern than Andrew Strauss. Only a year ago, he was England’s acting captain with an even chance of taking the team to Australia. Now, despite the award of a central contract last month, he is the most obvious batting omission if Mark Ramprakash should be recalled at the age of 38 to the place of honour that he deserves.

One of Strauss, Owais Shah or Ravi Bopara would have to stay at home if so. It would be tough on either of them and the easy solution would be to avoid the problem by continuing to treat Ramprakash as if he were an expensive diamond in a shop window, or a holiday home in Barbados: alluring, but out of reach except in the imagination. The truth, of course, is that he is available for free.

It is time for the selectors to say, without equivocation, that the most accomplished batsman in the country should be going in at first wicket down for England in Sri Lanka and in every subsequent Test match until the end of the series against Australia in 2009.

Age should have no part in the decision. Where would the England rugby union team be this week if they had eliminated all the thirtysomethings?

Hugh Morris, the new managing director of England affairs, has already spoken of the need for a general policy of selection. Its focal point should be the main goal of winning back the Ashes, just as the one-day decisions have to be geared to the next World Cup. For that reason, arguments against returning to the man who averaged 27 in his 52 Tests as a Middlesex player are flawed. Against Australia, the average was 42 and in his last match against them he scored one of his only two Test hundreds.

More to the point, six years on from his 133 at the Oval in 2001, he has become a run machine for Surrey, the scorer of 18 hundreds in 48 innings in the past two seasons and of 2,000-plus first-class runs at an average of better than 100 in both of them. The parallel with the experiences of Tom Graveney is too close to ignore. Picked again for England at the age of 39 in 1966 after an earlier Test career in which, despite significantly more success than Ramprakash, he had been deemed to be temperamentally suspect, he averaged better than 50 in four of his last seven series.

Better able to put his cricket into life’s perspective, Ramprakash is now a more relaxed and confident character, but is still dedicated to his craft. With Alastair Cook and Michael Vaughan to open and Kevin Pietersen, Paul Collingwood and Ian Bell to follow, England would have their best chance of overcoming the challenge from Muttiah Muralitharan. It was too much for them on their last tour to Sri Lanka and he took 21 wickets in the last two Tests in England last year.

There is a case for Strauss to be preferred to Shah for one more tour, but an equally strong one for him to have the mental rest that he has seemed to need since Andrew Flintoff was preferred as captain in Australia. In 12 Tests since his impressive series against South Africa as Vaughan’s stand-in captain in 2006, Strauss has scored only four fifties. He averaged 24 in Australia and 29 in the home series against West Indies and India.

The three Tests are back-to-back, so, with Tim Ambrose, Steve Davies and Phil Mustard due to be on a camp in India with the England Lions, it seems unnecessary to select more than one wicketkeeper. It was for his batting that Mustard was picked as Matt Prior’s replacement for the one-day games in Sri Lanka, but his natural hands as a ’keeper were what impressed from afar. If he is restored, Prior will have to make his case afresh, while supporters of Chris Read and James Foster remain dismayed.

For once, the bowling selections pose few problems. Ryan Sidebottom, Stephen Harmison, Matthew Hog-gard, Monty Panesar and Graeme Swann will vie for four places at the start of the series, with Collingwood as ballast and variation, leaving James Anderson to cover the two swing bowlers and Stuart Broad or Chris Tremlett standing by for Harmison.

CMJ’s selection

M P Vaughan (Yorkshire, captain), A N Cook (Essex), M R Ramprakash (Surrey), K P Pietersen (Hampshire), P D Collingwood (Durham), I R Bell (Warwickshire), M J Prior (Sussex), G P Swann (Nottinghamshire), R J Sidebottom (Nottinghamshire), S J Harmison (Durham), M S Panesar (Northamptonshire), M J Hoggard (Yorkshire), J M Anderson (Lancashire), R S Bopara (Essex), O A Shah (Middlesex), C T Tremlett (Hampshire). Probable variant: A J Strauss (Middlesex) for Ramprakash.

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