Flintoff, Boycott, Botham . . . Yesterday it was the turn of David Graveney and Chris Read to emerge discredited from the memoirs of Duncan Fletcher that are being serialised and are to be published next week. The stories that have emerged so far are the most eye-catching, naturally, but they amount to one man’s slant on events that were in wide currency.

Coming from the centre of the bubble inside which Fletcher sought to control the England team between late 1999 and his enforced resignation in April this year, they cannot be ignored, but in return everybody is having a go at Fletcher, which is no less distasteful. The sum of the two minuses, it is doing nothing for the good name of cricket, however much it may be adding to the sales of his book and the bank balances of himself and his ghost writer.

Fletcher, so poker-faced in his time as England’s generally very effective coach, was harbouring his grievances enough to insist on the right to publish a book as part of the renegotiation of his contract with the ECB in 2003. He became comfortably the most highly paid ECB employee, receiving more than the chief executive, and he received a year’s salary in a payoff after he was replaced by Peter Moores in April.

Graveney, who has reapplied for the job as national selector, is presented in the latest extract as a vacillator who said one thing to one man, another to somebody else. Fletcher said more than usual after the second Test match at Adelaide in Australia last year when Ashley Giles, controversially preferred to Monty Panesar for the first two Tests, dropped Ricky Ponting early in his crucial first-innings century. England subsequently froze and fell to defeat in a match that they could have won and certainly should not have lost and Fletcher let it be known afterwards that he had wanted Panesar and Giles to play.

He did so then by telling a journalist to divert the flak and by saying in response to questions about Panesar’s nonselection that he was “not the sole selector”. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Now he has spelt it out: “I wanted to play both spinners: Panesar replacing James Anderson from the first Test lineup. Even before the tour started I had thought that I would like two spinners at Adelaide, at Perth (although that was proved wrong) and Sydney, too. We went into our management meeting and every person there, bar me, wanted just one spinner and wanted him to be Giles.”

The criticism of Graveney concerns one of the other repeatedly aired selection issues of last winter’s calamitous tour. Marcus Trescothick had gone home before the Test series had begun, exposing the wishful thinking of all those who had concluded that his psychological problems were behind him. But another of the Ashes heroes of 2005, Geraint Jones, was back behind the stumps from the start of the tour, despite having been displaced by Read halfway through the previous summer’s series against Pakistan.

Only a myopic observer could describe Read’s performances behind the stumps in the last two Tests against Pakistan as being inadequate, yet Fletcher had wanted to replace Jones with Matt Prior and he makes the astonishing claim now that it was only Graveney and Geoff Miller who wanted Read to tour Australia: “None of the [four or five] other players questioned even thought Read should have been on the tour, let alone in the Test side.”

Fletcher disparages Read for having no defensive technique, too narrow a wicketkeeping channel, thus causing Trescothick at first slip to miss slip catches on the inside, and for failing to get stuck in when Paul Collingwood was losing a verbal battle with Shane Warne in the Sydney Test. Depth of batting had always been a Fletcher priority, generally speaking, rightly so. Fletcher claims that Graveney had been in favour of dropping Read to give Jones his chance in the West Indies in 2004 one match earlier than the switch was made - in the last Test of the four-match series – and that Graveney subsequently failed to tell Rod Marsh, a selector at the time, that he had been a party to the decision to prefer Jones.

Later Fletcher says that Graveney failed to make it clear to the press last winter that Paul Nixon was the first choice as one-day wicketkeeper ahead of Read, despite having assured Fletcher that he would do so. No wonder Fletcher tried to resign as a selector in 2006, but his book would have served himself and the game better if a smile had emerged from behind the sunglasses. Instead we are seeing a mean man, protesting too much.

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