"We haven't been able to see some people so it will make a few decisions a bit more difficult," said Fletcher. "We will have to assume some things when we pick the side.
"We really wanted to have a good look at them over here and see how they reacted under pressure. In this part of the world you have to play under a lot of pressure at times, and that brings out the character in people.
"We have always struggled on the type of pitches you find out here and it would have been good experience for them.
"You can talk to them about the conditions but they don't really appreciate what you are trying to get at. Then they play on these pitches and you can see them starting to work things out.
"The big problem with these wash-outs is that people are missing out on experience that can make them better cricketers on all surfaces."
With the next World Cup, in the Caribbean, a little more than three years away there's plenty of time for players to develop and build up a wealth of knowledge - provided the current squad stay more or less intact through to 2007.
The worry is England are not much wiser now about Andrew Strauss, Ian Blackwell, Rikki Clarke, Gareth Batty, Chris Read and others than they were when the squad were picked.
"We would like to have seen more of the batsmen from No 6 downwards - the young, inexperienced guys," said Fletcher. "We haven't really learned a lot."
To have any chance of mounting a serious World Cup challenge come 2007, England need to hit upon a settled squad soon.
Some chopping and changing is inevitable. But it should be minimal, rather than wholesale.
England had a fair amount of experience on hand going into this year's tournament in South Africa.
Players such as Alec Stewart, then skipper Nasser Hussain, Nick Knight and Andrew Caddick were to the fore.
But, overall, the squad were hardly settled.
Indeed, compared to the group of players who travelled to southern Africa with Fletcher three years earlier, only Hussain, Knight, Caddick, Andrew Flintoff and Ashley Giles remained.
England want considerably more than five of this winter's squad to be on board in the 2007 tournament, otherwise all the current talk of building for "the big one" will be a waste of breath.
Vaughan, although not yet a proven one-day player by any means, Marcus Trescothick and Flintoff can be considered, quite reasonably, as certainties.
Paul Collingwood, Clarke and Jimmy Anderson are probables.
Thereafter, though, the selectors are into a bit of crystal ball gazing with the storms here over the last few days having only clouded the issue.
A more immediate problem for Vaughan and Fletcher, however, is a Test series against Sri Lanka which starts a week tomorrow.
They have a three-day game against the President's XI here this week to look at their options, weather permitting.
Having added veteran offspinner Robert Croft to the original squad, England seem certain to give him an outing on Wednesday.
Indeed, they could play all three specialist slow bowlers in order to compare the performances of Croft, Batty and Ashley Giles.
.jpeg?trim=0,0,0,0&quality=75&auto=webp&width=320&crop=8:5,smart)
