I WAS pleased to see Keaton Jennings get the call-up to England's squad for today's fourth Test against India in Mumbai as a replacement for Haseeb Hameed because, if I'm honest, I thought he was unfortunate not to go in the first place.

Hameed's age probably worked in his favour and he performed well in those first three Tests, to be fair to him.

But Jennings scored 1,500 Championship runs last season, including seven hundreds, and I'd feel pretty upset if I didn't get selected on the back of form like that. It's just rewards for him and hopefully he will do well.

Jennings looks to have worked out his game now. Prior to last summer, he'd been batting on some pretty poor wickets, but it's helped him that the Riverside has changed quite a bit recently.

There are plenty of similarities between him and Hameed. They both occupy the crease for long periods of time, highlighted by his unbeaten double hundred against us at the Riverside in June.

He has definitely evolved a lot as a player over the last 12 months. Prior to last season, you felt like you could bowl at him, but he's become a lot more clinical now, puts the bad balls away and scores quicker than he used to. I don't think they're dissimilar in their temperaments though.

Jennings' major challenge will be dealing with Ravi Ashwin, who has had the hold over left-handers so far in the series.

England obviously can't win the series from here but if they can dig in and show some character, a draw would be a great result.

On the whole, they've played well over the last 18 months, both at home and abroad, and if you want to be the No 1 side in the world, these are the series in which they need to show what they're about. I think they have the quality to get to that ranking, so there's still a lot to gain in this series.

On to Yorkshire matters, and our pre-season training is going really well. So far, training has been quite varied and it's about keeping everybody stimulated.

Some of the more experienced players, the ones who've done ten to 12 pre-seasons, sometimes it's nice to just do something a bit different – even for the young lads.

Sometimes doing all the gym work can be quite repetitive, so we went to play badminton last week and had a team-building day at Catterick Barracks earlier this week, which was good.

At the badminton, I was partnered with Matthew Waite and we played some mixed stuff. We were either really good or really bad. Azeem Rafiq and Ryan Sidebottom were the tournament winners.

We've got high teens in terms of numbers in training, which is more than we've had in the past couple of winters at this stage.

Most of the lads are fighting fit. We have a couple of niggles floating around, which is normal at this time of year when you come back into training.

We've got three weeks until Christmas, so we'll be giving it everything for those three weeks before we get a good break. Then we return early January, and before you know it, the season will be here.

Although some have started cricket skills already, including myself, some more cricket is being introduced into the programme for the whole group this week.

I've been batting for a few weeks now and I'm hoping to go away somewhere in the New Year. I'm not 100 per cent sure where yet but I'm really enjoying my batting.

I'm not working on anything in particular technique-wise, although there are always little bits you're looking to critique and improve. There are no major changes because the core of my game served me well last year.

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