BETTER the devil you know, and better the angel, too. Since he returned to the national team with his mental equilibrium restored, Graham Thorpe, the best England batsman of his generation, has scored 1,569 runs in 22 Test matches at an average of 54. He has hit five hundreds, several of them crucial, two against South Africa, two against West Indies and one against New Zealand.

In between there have been eight fifties, most of them gritty hallmark Thorpe innings: dabbing the ball there, working it here, punching it past cover point’s right hand or through that gap at extra cover; even hooking it thrillingly to the square-leg boundary off his eyebrows.

There are reasons why he might not play against Bangladesh in Durham in this week’s second Test, for which the team will not be announced until tomorrow morning. The very delay in that announcement confirms that the selectors are agonising over whether Thorpe, Robert Key (if fit) or Kevin Pietersen should go in at No 5 in the second meaningless match of a series that started with England’s facile victory in seven playing sessions at Lord’s, ending before lunch on Saturday in the third biggest victory in their history. Frankly, I cannot get very agitated about which of the three gets the opportunity to make easy runs in Chester-le-Street, but I certainly can about which of them takes the place in the first Test against Australia when England return to Lord’s on July 21.

Thorpe’s 100th Test cap — he has won 99 — is a red herring. What matters is getting the 11 players to Lord’s who have the best chance of making a winning start against Australia, without which they will not win the series or regain the Ashes. Three things must be emphasised before Messrs Graveney, Miller, Marsh and Fletcher make up their minds, although they really should not need to be: that Thorpe, however much he may have infuriated some of those close to the dressing-room in recent years, is a batsman of courage and rare skill; that his record is superior to Key’s in the period in which they have sometimes played together over the past two years; and that the alternative, Pietersen, whose time will come very soon, is an unknown quality at the highest level.

Doubting Thorpe’s continuing right to a Test place was reasonable in view of his often unconvincing, yet at important times also effective, batting in South Africa last winter. Again, it was fair to assess his early season form in the light of that modest tour — his Test average in South Africa dropped to 35 — especially because there was further concern about the durability of his rickety back. It is not so clear why he is being condemned by some for his announcement that he will not be available to England for the tour to India after Christmas and, by implication, for the visit to Pakistan late this year.

There is seldom an ideal time to signal the end of a Test career. Very few, like Nasser Hussain last year, have the chance to do it on a tide of triumph and emotion, knowing that a worthy replacement (Andrew Strauss) had arrived. At least Thorpe made his announcement through official channels, not in his newspaper column, although he used that yesterday to emphasise that he is keen to play against Australia.

Of course he is and in my view he should do so. Two of the selectors were furious when the news of Thorpe’s acceptance of a playing and coaching engagement in Sydney from next January was conveyed to them before the Lord’s Test last week after he had spoken to Duncan Fletcher and Michael Vaughan. That was unreasonable of them and it would be unfair, too, to punish him for planning his immediate future, at the age of almost 36, by dropping him or making the deduction that this will somehow reduce his passion for the battle against Australia.

That is not in Thorpe’s nature. He is England’s equivalent of a stereotype beloved of journalists and cricket followers on the other side of the world: “a great little Aussie battler”. He has made three hundreds in 16 Tests against Australia, averages 45 against them and his presence later in the season against them would make it that much tougher for the formidable foursome of McGrath, Gillespie, Kasprowicz and, the key man, Warne. As Vaughan said on Saturday: “I just want the best England team and the best XI at the minute probably includes Graham Thorpe.”