In a traumatic seven days for English cricket, a perversity remains. The most perilous position in the dressing room is not that of the captain but the man with the gloves. That will continue to be so until the selectors commit properly to a wicketkeeper who they believe can average more than 35 at No 7 and snaffle the vast majority of chances that come his way.

Since Tim Ambrose failed in the first innings on Friday, then grassed a tough catch to his left to reprieve Hashim Amla on 58 off Andrew Flintoff yesterday morning, this has not been the match to sweep the debate under the carpet. Ambrose deserves our sympathy. Not much else happened before the rain arrived, which inevitably sharpened the critics’ focus, and the drop did not exactly belong in the howler category.

But such has been the selectorial indecision since the retirement of the near-mythical Alec Stewart in 2003 that every fluff by an England keeper feels like one more bullet in the revolver chamber. And with Matt Prior about to resume his international career in the one-day NatWest Series at Ambrose’s expense, the selectors have done little to dispel notions of a game of Russian roulette.

It seems fair to read more into Prior’s recall than a lack of faith in Ambrose’s one-day batting after a sequence of 10 runs in five innings during the recent defeat against New Zealand, when he also made a horrible hash of a skyer in the final match at Lord’s. After all, England preferred Ambrose to Durham’s Phil Mustard for that series — after Mustard had performed reasonably during the winter in Sri Lanka and New Zealand — because they wanted the same keeper in both forms of the game.

By that logic, the omission of Ambrose from the one-dayers against South Africa, starting with a Twenty20 game at Chester-le-Street on August 20 and leading on to five 50-over matches, ought to be the precursor to his demotion from the Test team. England don’t play another Test until December 11 in Ahmedabad, so Geoff Miller and his fellow selectors may conclude that there is plenty of time to soften the blow.

Ambrose could yet get another innings today or tomorrow to make his case, but the feeling persists that, tidy though his keeping generally is, his batting now has more in common with the tail than the top six.

Paradoxically, the century he made at a crucial stage of his second Test, at Wellington in March, has turned out to be a mixed blessing, since it allowed opposition analysts a prolonged look at his square cut. Deprived of his favourite shot as bowlers learnt to pitch the ball up, he has been tentative outside off stump, where his preference for the back foot (a function, perhaps, of his lack of height: he is 5ft 7in) means he can be slow to get forward. The tame poke on Friday afternoon to first slip that brought his series aggregate to 97 runs at an average of 16 and reduced his Test average to a mediocre 24.7 has become the rule rather than the exception.

Ambrose has not been helped by being shunted around the order. He was a place too high at No 6 at Headingley and one too low at No 8 at Edgbaston. Even so, England may quietly be wondering whether they discarded Prior at the wrong time, despite a horrible performance with the gloves in Galle last December, when he twice dropped Mahela Jayawardene while he was en route to a series-clinching 213 not out.

Support for the theory comes from a potential rival, the Nottinghamshire and former England keeper Chris Read. “I was surprised when Prior was dropped,” Read says. “That potentially showed the difference between Duncan Fletcher and Peter Moores. I’m not sure he would have been discarded under Fletcher. Maybe Moores, as an ex-keeper, felt his keeping standards were below what was needed.

“But having watched Prior and seen him play this year in county cricket, from a batting perspective he’s the best out there. His wicketkeeping is solid, but he needs to find someone who can help him develop his game.”

James Foster, of Essex, who has the chance to remind doubters of his existence in Saturday’s Friends Provident Trophy final against Kent at Lord’s, can also expect to be discussed before the tour of India, but it is Prior who will have first crack at redemption next week. Harsh though it may be on Ambrose, England must make a decision and stick with it.

Assuming Prior does not have a nightmare in the one-dayers against South Africa, the chances are he will be batting at seven and keeping wicket when the Australians arrive next summer.