Kevin Pietersen must get Ashes build-up right, says Bob Willis

Kevin Pietersen's absence for next month's Test series against New Zealand raises a number of concerns but I'd be very surprised if he wasn't available for all of this summer's Ashes Tests.

Nip

England's back-up staff certainly have their hands full at the moment. Pietersen's problem is hopefully no more than a headache, so to speak, but the recurring natures of the injuries affecting Graeme Swann and Tim Bresnan are both very concerning. The medical team need to get to the bottom of them as soon as possible because 2013 is going to be such a hectic time for those involved in more than one format of the game. There may be some question marks about Swann's long-term future in limited overs cricket if this elbow is going to keep recurring for him. Stuart Broad has missed a lot of cricket over the years too. It's one thing monitoring players but I do think that England need to make quicker decisions about diagnosis and what the treatment is going to be. When Broad, James Anderson and Steven Finn are all fit England's bowling attack picks itself. Bresnan is back playing for Yorkshire now, but the one player I'm keeping a particularly keen eye on is Chris Tremlett at Surrey. I know that bowling coach Neil Saker is a huge fan of his, not least because he made such a terrific difference to England when he came in during the last Ashes series in Australia. Two or three of the current crop of Australian top-order batsmen don't like the ball around their noses at all and Tremlett will be right in the selectors' minds if he can put together some performances for Surrey. That's even more so the case given that Finn struggled to make his mark as a strike bowler in New Zealand, even allowing for the fact that the pitches were painfully slow. If you can move the ball around even a little bit at high pace, it makes such a difference because most batsmen will struggle. South African Dale Steyn keeps proving that time and time again. But both Finn and Graham Onions seem to have lost a bit of nip and that might just open the door for Tremlett.