Australia skipper Mitchell Marsh is confident that his side’s relatively inexperienced bowling attack will rise to the challenge in the absence of frontline pacers Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood during the T20 World Cup.
This will be the first major ICC tournament since 2016 where Australia will not feature a single member of their famed pace trio.
While Starc retired from the format last year, Cummins and Hazlewood have been ruled out of the tournament due to injuries.
“Yeah, look, guys like Paddy have played a lot for us over the last few years due to his hectic schedule and over the last 12 months guys like Benny Dwarshuis and Xavier Bartlett have played pretty much all of our games. So we’ve got great confidence that they’ve been able to do a role for us, and they’ve excelled in some games. So we’re confident with the group that we’ve got here. And we’ve built that for the last 12 months,” said Marsh.
The Aussie skipper said that they were able to provide to game time to their core group over the last 12 months and it will come in handy during the T20 World Cup.
“We’ve sort of built out a squad of maybe 18 to 20 people that have played over the last 12 months and we’ve got game time to all of them. They’ve all faced different situations in matches and whilst some of them haven’t played a lot for Australia, they’ve played a lot of cricket and we’ve got great confidence that they’re going to be able to do the job for us,” said Marsh.
Australia will be playing all their group stage matches in Colombo, where teams have been using spin to win. The recent Sri Lanka vs Ireland game saw 25 out of the 40 overs bowled by spinners and Marsh admitted it is something they will look to implement as well.
“Didn’t think that we’d get turned a lot, but we certainly know the conditions that we’re going to be faced with. And I think most teams will have, I guess, similar ideas on how they’re going to go about it. So we’re prepared for that and we’re ready to go,” said Marsh.
