Normally I'd agree (and I too would be happy to see Foakes play), but I fail to see how the batting gets worse by dropping Bairstow for Curran.
Stokes has spells as a top bowler, but in the first innings especially he was erratic. With no Anderson, we were basically down to Broad and Woakes, with Moeen ineffective on a first innings pitch yet to show much for the spinner and Stokes all over the place. It's debatable as to whether Stokes would be in the side if he didn't know which end of the bat to hold, so in my book an extra bowler might be a good thing, as long as it doesn't overly extend the tail.
Curran has looked good as a test bowler whenever he's been called upon and the left armer offers a decent alternative - when the tail was starting to wag (and how) from 122-8, it would have been good to have something different from right arm 80-85mph to try and break the partnership.
Stokes is certainly a fourth seamer option, no more. He's very clearly a batting all-rounder and I hope to see him improve his batting average over the coming years. But I do think three full seamers plus stokes plus a spinner is enough. Adding one more seamer strikes me as overkill. I advocated six bowlers a couple of years ago, but that was when Moeen could still bat and was a way to get two spinners in.
I'm not totally convinced by Curran as a test bowler, tbh, and while I take your point that including him hardly weakens the batting, that's really an indictment of the batting more than an endorsement of Curran, who has never scored a first class hundred.
That's really the worry here - the top seven. There's one batsman averaging 49. Next come the mid-thirtysomethings - Bairstow, Buttler and Stokes, 35, 34 and 33 respectively. All established players so their averages are a pretty true statement of their worth, which is not quite what you want. Next come the twentysomethings - Denly, Roy and Burns. None established yet so you can't quite judge them on their averages, but all three have started their test careers poorly, and they're not youngsters - when a batsman is picked in his late 20s or early 30s, you really need him to hit the ground running in test cricket as he's not being picked on his promise.
So England only really have one proven high-quality test-class batsman, taking an average of 40 as the benchmark (you might also include 38-39, but not 35). Only one proven test-class top-order batsman (Root) has emerged in the last decade. That's one fuck of a famine, hence tolerating batsmen averaging in the mid-thirties, who would be struggling to keep their places in a stronger team. It's sobering to think that ten years ago we had seven proven high-quality test-class batsmen in the top seven.
