Ahead of Australia’s clash against England in 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup, skipper Pat Cummins has backed for having larger squads in global tournaments. As of now, World Cup has provision for 15-member main squads, with some traveling reserves.
With Glenn Maxwell out of Saturday’s clash due to concussion and Mitchell Marsh flying back home due to personal reasons, Australia are facing the prospect of choosing their playing eleven from just 13 players, prompting a question over increasing World Cup squad members in future.
“To be honest, I mean, it's a two-month tournament. You wouldn't want to be in a position where, say, somewhere like a team like New Zealand have had some injuries and luckily, they've been able to hold someone like Kane in the squad.”
“But if suddenly you had to rule him out - I think that wouldn't be good for a cricket or a World Cup. It's not like you can poach players from other countries, so I always kind of think as many players as you need, you should be able to pick from,” said Cummins in the pre-match press conference.
As of now, Australia are yet to have full 15 players to select from for their matches, with Travis Head making a comeback post a finger fracture recovery with a fabulous century against New Zealand in Dharamshala and Sean Abbott yet to get a game.
“To be honest once the tournament started, we kind of thought we'd have 15 available. But one day cricket more than any other format, you have injuries, it's high intensity, it's games are close together. So, we always knew there was going to be a certain amount of attrition.”
“I mean, the good thing is we're still three games away from the semis. We need to obviously make the semifinals, but hopefully this is kind of the last little kind of hiccup where we've got a smaller squad to pick from and then once we get closer, we've got a full squad.”
“But I've kind of got in my mind the main 11, the way that we want to play, but really happy with our squad. I think we've shown throughout this tournament we've been able to mix up the batting order and anyone that's come in has stepped up and done really well,” he added.
Talking about the absence of Maxwell and Marsh, Cummins said, “Maxi's hopefully (available) for the clash against Afghanistan, so he'll just miss this one. But he's trained well yesterday and still taking it day by day.”
“But hoping he'll just miss this one and then Mitch we'll wait and see - he'll definitely come back. I don't think it'll be a super long trip back home to Perth, but main thing is he's back home and we'll give him as much time and space as he needs.”
Cummins also admitted to being surprised over England’s form in the competition, where the defending champions have lost five out of six games to be on bottom of the points table, with their semi-final hopes hanging by a slim thread.
“A little bit surprised; they've obviously got some class players and performed really well in these kind of tournaments over the last few years. A little bit surprised in terms of what's gone wrong, probably not for me to say, these tournaments are pretty fickle. You see it in T20 tournament around the world, sometimes the best-looking teams just don't start off well and then find it hard to kind of gain ground.”