LONDON, May 21: England have resisted any temptation to rush their leading strike bowler Steve Harmison back into the side for the second Test against Sri Lanka starting at Edgbaston on Thursday.

Instead they have kept faith with the side that drew the first Test at Lord's last Monday apart from omitting reserve batsman Ian Bell from a squad of 12 announced on Sunday.

Harmison, 27, who has been suffering from a sore right shin, decided not to bowl on the last afternoon of Durham's match against Nottinghamshire at Trent Bridge on Saturday.

“Stephen Harmison was considered for this Test match, but ultimately we have decided that his and England's interests would be best served by allowing him more time to regain full match fitness,” chairman of selectors David Graveney said in a statement.

“He is making good progress and we will continue to closely monitor his performances for Durham.”

Bell, who was named in a squad of 13 for the opening Test of the English season to give the selectors the option of fielding a sixth specialist batsman, has been omitted.

England scored 551 for six declared in their only innings but then failed to force the win after making Sri Lanka follow on. The England fielders dropped nine catches, six of them in the second innings.

“We decided that we didn't need that option going into Edgbaston,” Graveney told Sky Sports. “The batsmen did a job by posting a very good score.

“If we had caught even a small percentage of those chances the result would have been different. But we didn't.”

Graveney also defended Andrew Flintoff against charges he had bowled too much at Lord's, under-bowled left-arm spinner Monty Panesar and failed to set sufficiently aggressive fields on the final day.

He said Flintoff's captaincy in place of the injured Michael Vaughan when England beat India in Mumbai this year to level the three-Test series was probably the best he had seen abroad in his time as chairman of selectors.

“He's done a brilliant job,” Graveney said. “The wicket (at Lord's) was still flat, it was always going to be a hard job.”

Gloucestershire pace bowler Jon Lewis, who was released on the first morning of the Lord's Test, has again been included in the squad.

Lewis is the most successful bowler in the country so far this year with 24 wickets at eight runs each and could possibly play in an all-pace attack in Birmingham.

“It will be interesting what (coach) Duncan Fletcher and Freddie (Flintoff) think of the wicket,” Graveney said.

“There's been a lot of rain. Jon has been an outstanding performer for Gloucestershire for the past two or three years.”

Squad: Marcus Trescothick, Andrew Strauss, Alastair Cook, Kevin Pietersen, Paul Colllingwood, Andrew Flintoff (captain), Geraint Jones, Liam Plunkett, Matthew Hoggard, Jon Lewis, Sajid Mahmood, Monty Panesar.—Reuters