The problems they’re facing – injury and key players carrying a lot of miles in their legs – have no easy solutions
Karthik Krishnaswamy15-Oct-20235:31
Finch: ‘Australia need a way to freshen up mentally and physically’
David Warner. Mitchell Marsh. Steven Smith. Glenn Maxwell. Mitchell Starc. Pat Cummins. Josh Hazlewood. They were part of Australia’s World Cup squad eight years ago; they’re still part of Australia’s World Cup squad now.No other team at the 2023 World Cup has as many survivors from 2015. India and New Zealand, with five each, come closest.And it isn’t just that Australia have seven survivors. All seven are key members of their first XI.This, in one sense, is a reflection of how good Australia were in 2015, when they won a home World Cup with barely any hiccups along the way, and of how good these seven players are. It’s possible to wonder, though, particularly after the rocky start they’ve had to their 2023 campaign, whether this level of continuity is entirely desirable. At what point does continuity turn into stasis?It’s no doubt a view coloured by recent results and the mediaperson’s tendency to hanker for shiny new things to talk about, but there’s a definite jadedness to Australia’s ODI set-up. Where some other teams – India, for instance – have torn up their ODI template and started over more than once over the last two World Cup cycles, Australia continue to play the way they’ve always played. They have an explosive line-up buttressed by a pair of busy anchors, and they trust in their best – which usually translates to Test – fast bowlers no matter what the conditions are.It’s not an unsound template, per se, but this World Cup has almost stretched it to breaking point. They’ve lost a key player who would have strengthened their top order and given them a spin option, for potentially the entire first half of their campaign; their one real wicket-taking spinner has been playing at less than full fitness; the allrounders in their middle order haven’t fired with the bat; and conditions have shortened the window in which their fast bowlers are most effective.Some of this is the kind of bad luck that could befall any team at the start of a tournament. Some of it, however, you could have seen coming from the time Australia picked their squad.Here’s the thing; Australia may have themselves seen it coming. They are probably aware that their attack is light on spin options, and that their lower middle order is filled with players who are either going through lean patches in ODIs, unproven in the format, or coming back from injury. It isn’t out of obstinacy, though, that they’ve backed this set of players and this way of playing.3:01
Cummins: ‘We’ve not been up to the standards we like to hold’
They’ve done it because they don’t have easy solutions to their problems. Take their lack of spin options. The bowlers who could have conceivably played the second specialist spinner’s role are either injured (Ashton Agar), lack match practice since returning from injury (Nathan Lyon), or lack ODI experience (Tanveer Sangha, Todd Murphy, Matt Kuhnemann, Mitchell Swepson and so forth).That third category, which also includes a number of batters and fast bowlers who’ve been on the fringes of this Australia side, speaks to a larger problem. It’s an Australia problem, but it affects enough teams for it to be an ODI problem in a wider sense. A number of teams simply haven’t played enough ODI cricket in the lead-up to this World Cup to be able to build a proper pool of players.Australia exemplify this issue. They played 44 ODIs between the 2019 World Cup and this one, as compared to 76 between 2015 and 2019.The fewer games you play in the lead-up to a major tournament, the harder it is to balance the conflicting aims of giving regulars game-time and testing out new faces. You can do one or the other, at best, and Australia chose to prioritise the former. Only 16 of their players played 10 or more ODIs between the 2019 and 2023 World Cups, of whom 14 are part of their squad in India. The other two are Agar, who missed out due to injury, and Aaron Finch, their retired ex-captain. Josh Inglis, who played eight ODIs between World Cups, is the only member of their squad from outside this group of 16.You can see why Australia stuck with the tried and tested, even if there was a growing sense of tired and tested about it.There’s another kind of tiredness in the mix too, the tiredness of the all-format player. Nine members of this World Cup squad were part of Australia’s Test tour of India earlier this year, and 11 were in England for the World Test Championship final and the Ashes. Seven were involved in the IPL. Three players featured in all the above assignments, of whom Hazlewood and Warner had what they may now believe to be the good fortune of leaving the India tour with injury. The other member of this trio, Cameron Green, has only spent two weeks at home, approximately, since boarding the flight to India on January 31.This World Cup is a long one, forgiving to teams that get off to slow starts. Australia are by no means out of contention for the semi-finals just yet, but no matter how their tournament goes from here, they’ll be utterly exhausted when it’s done.
