England Lions side to face South Africa Invitation XI

The three-day game starts today withLiam Plunkett, Boyd Rankin, Jack Brooks and Mark Wood will form a tasty-looking pace attack, with Adil Rashid playing as a leg-spinning all-rounder.

Lions coach Mark Robinson has said that the selection was made with the first of the two four-day matches against South Africa A in mind.

Robinson said: “We’re looking to get everybody further down the line and hopefully ready to hit the first 'Test' match hard.

“Practice was a bit curtailed yesterday because of the weather but we managed to get out on grass today and the next stage is playing a game, getting competitive.

“We’ve picked a team that is as near as we can imagine to the team that’s going to be playing in the first ‘Test’ match, subject to injuries. The turnaround is quite quick, we’ve only got this one warm-up game, so it’s just about getting people ready to hit that match hard.

“It was a difficult selection for all those reasons. We viewed the work done in Sri Lanka and South Africa before Christmas as the development stage of the winter, so now we move on to performance, and the last measure we had of performance and form comes from last summer, so that has been a key factor in our thinking.”

It means this Lions team can boast five Test cricketers who share a total of 84 caps, in addition to a sixth in Rashid who has played one-day and Twenty20 international cricket.

England Lions (v Gauteng Invitation XI): Lyth (Yorkshire), Robson (Middlesex), Lees (Yorkshire), Trott (Warwickshire, capt), Vince (Hampshire), Bairstow (Yorkshire, wk), Rashid (Yorkshire), Plunkett (Yorkshire), Wood (Durham), Rankin (Warwickshire), Brooks (Yorkshire).