World Cup Warner facing home Test threat from Shield rivals
London: Australia’s selectors will be looking for a young opening batter to blast out of the blocks in the Sheffield Shield, before examining ODI World Cup returns to determine who will partner Usman Khawaja in the first Test of the home summer.
While David Warner has the chance to keep his name in lights by performing strongly in the World Cup in India in October and November, head coach Andrew McDonald made it clear that the likes of Matt Renshaw, Cameron Bancroft and Marcus Harris will use the Shield to push for an opening place.
David Warner at the Oval.Credit: Reuters
Warner, though fluent at times, failed to make a single score of lasting impact, ending his final Test innings in England by edging Chris Woakes behind on the final day of the Ashes series.
“I think we like to split the formats,” McDonald said when asked about using limited-overs form as a guide to Test selection. “If you perform in T20, does that get you a look in one-day cricket – maybe, maybe not.
“And the same for the one-day international format into Test cricket, there can be some crossover depending on what you need at certain times, but we’ll assess each format on its own.
“But Dave was picked in the last Test match here and I thought the way he went about it for a certain period of time was outstanding. He’s always going to have some sort of speculation around what he’s doing and where he’s heading, but we’ve got a long time before that first Test match in Australia and Perth.”
McDonald acknowledged that wider questions of team regeneration needed to be addressed in the yawning five-month gap between the Oval Test and the first of the home summer against Pakistan in Perth in December.
“I think that’s a relevant question for all three formats,” he said. “We’ve got to assess where we’re at at the end of this, we’ve got South Africa coming up for the ODI series and T20s, and how the bodies are for that.
“And as many hands on deck with the schedule we have is critical. We’re not in any rush to make any key decisions around key personnel for any format, and we feel everyone who played a part in this series performed their role to some degree at certain times.”
Looking back on the Ashes, McDonald was frank in depicting the 2023 England tour as falling short of the team’s expectations, particularly after they went 2-0 up.
“We didn’t quite achieve what we set out to achieve, we clearly wanted to come here and win the Ashes but the cricket we played, the cricket both teams played was fascinating,” he said.
“People should be proud of what they’ve been able to achieve, even if we didn’t quite get to where we wanted to in winning the Ashes.”
As for the ball change widely identified as a swing factor in the final innings of the series, McDonald said England’s tactical shift had been jarring, if not insurmountable for Australia, had they avoided a pair of collapses.
“I’ve never seen tactics shift so dramatically,” he said. “Went from catchers in front of the wicket to behind the wicket, and there’s no doubt in some ways changed the shape of the game and the tactics within the game.
“So I will say that ball change did have a significant bearing on the tactics, the way that England went about it. But in saying that, I think we still should have been able to navigate that. There were two clumps where we lost 3-30 and 5-50, and that’s part of us owning it.
“The umpires are out there to make a decision, and they had a box of balls to choose from, and they made the best decision at that time from what they saw was there.”
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