Pietersen had a solid Ashes, or certainly had his best series of any description for a long time - apart from the World Twenty20 of course, but that was just weird how well he played in that. This season he has done his 227 and his fair share with the bat, and took a hatful of catches - that makes him just about good enough for now. He is sadly no longer the upper-middle order batsman to die for - the days of 2005-2008 are long gone - but he remains a good player for England.
Impressive win for mixture of England full and second-string side. Bell just gets better and better - I haven't decided yet, but I'm not sure that I've seen a more naturally talented batsman in the England shirt since I started watching in '99. My stab at a team for the first ODI would be as follows:
Strauss (c)
Davies (wk)
Bell
Pietersen
Collingwood
Morgan
Bresnan
Yardy
Swann
Shahzad
Tremlett
T20 squad is pretty much the same apart from Lumb and Finn being added, so I guess you would have Lumb in for Strauss and have Collingwood as captain. With the return of Pietersen, not sure where Trott fits in to either XI now - he's been damn useful in ODI cricket so far but maybe when the pressure's on, he scores too slowly. They may well prefer him to one of my batsmen though.
England beat NZ and Aus in the tri-series on their last tour of Oz, almost unbelievable really, given how bad our tour and our team had been. I won't be losing sleep over the result of these nine (yes nine...) games but it would be nice to win as many as possible - our record on this tour thus far is won 6, drawn 3, lost 1. Therefore a strong LOI showing would complete a very happy tour indeed.