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They’re building towards a strong squad for the tournament, but some concerns linger

Andrew McGlashan08-Nov-2025The damp final match of the T20I series in Brisbane brought an end to a run of 16 T20Is for Australia since late July against West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand and India. They won’t play again until after the T20 World Cup squad is named next February. Having come away with 10 wins and three defeats over the last four months, and used 21 players, it’s a good time to ask where they stand heading into that tournament.”I think it’s been an amazing couple of months of cricket for our team,” Mitchell Marsh said after the washout at the Gabba. “We’ve had a lot of moving parts, probably to do with the Ashes build-up, but I think we’ve played some really good and consistent cricket, and I’m really proud of the run we’ve had.”We set out to create a squad that can hopefully win us the World Cup. We wanted to make some slight changes after what we saw as a couple of failed attempts, so we’ve been consistent with that.”

Power and depth, but is there an Achilles heel?

It’s hardly reinventing the T20 wheel to emphasise power, but Australia have clearly stacked their line-up with pure hitters. And it has worked. Since the last T20 World Cup, they are the second-fastest scoring Full Member, marginally behind England.They were already strong in the powerplay – in the 12 months including the previous World Cup they ranked top – but have pushed things even further. They’ve been happy to trade wickets for tempo, helped by the presence of many frontline batters as true allrounders. They can bat down to No. 7 and still have an abundance of bowling options.Related

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Josh Inglis has spoken about working on the strength side of his game to regularly clear the ropes, while Cameron Green’s brute force in the West Indies, albeit on smaller grounds, was eye-catching.However, one vulnerability showed up against India, especially on slower, turning surfaces. India’s spinners caused problems, posing the question of whether Australia have a Plan B to navigate such circumstances.”The Indian surfaces that we’ll face generally will be very good in smaller grounds, so we’ve certainly played a consistent style we want to continue and now it’s about carrying that into the World Cup,” Marsh said.

David’s new role

A subtle but key shift in Australia’s planning has been the elevation of Tim David. Once seen only as a finisher, he was sometimes underused, playing only a limited number of deliveries. But over the last four series he has batted at No. 5 and, in Green’s absence, at No. 4, with destructive results.”He’s just gone up another level in the last six to 12 months,” Nathan Ellis said during the India series. “The coaching staff deserve credit. They’ve empowered him to back his natural game, given him freedom higher up the order – just don’t change the way you play. It’s freed him up tenfold.”His century in St Kitts was spectacular and he followed that with 83 off 52 balls against South Africa when Australia were in early trouble but refused to consolidate. Against India, he hammered 74 off 38 balls in Hobart.Before July he had never batted in the powerplay for Australia, but this year his strike rate in that period is 215.15, behind only Namibia’s Jan Frylinck.”In the powerplay, any ball you hit past the field is a boundary,” David said in Hobart. “You don’t have to hit over the fielders, so it can be a bit easier. It’s a new challenge for me, having not done it much, but I’m getting experience up the order now and trying to make the most of it.”

Winning batting first?

Marsh now sits 21 from 21 in terms of winning the toss and bowling first in T20Is. But he insists he’s not wedded to the tactic if conditions call for batting first. In this series, the one time they were forced to bat – when India won the toss in Hobart – they made 186 but couldn’t defend it.”There’s been a bit of talk about that hasn’t there?” Marsh said with a wry smile. “I often ask would I get asked the same question if I’ve batted first every time, so I don’t necessarily see it as an unusual tactic that we employ. There will be times when the conditions suit and we will bat first so we’re not closed-minded by that in any sense. But a lot of the grounds and a lot of the conditions that we face we feel that we’re best suited to chasing. [On] the day it’s 40 overs of cricket so as long as we score more runs than the other team we’ll win.”Hazlewood’s metronomic bowling and T20 smarts makes him nearly unplayable on some days•Getty Images

Hazlewood’s cutting edge

Mitchell Starc has retired from T20Is and it remains uncertain if Pat Cummins will be available for the T20 World Cup, even if he plays in the Ashes. Australia have built their T20 pace depth, but Josh Hazlewood remains a vital strike weapon. His presence was missed in the last three games against India. Across three series (he was rested for the West Indies matches after the Tests), he has only once gone for more than 30, when Dewald Brevis had a day out in Darwin.In his most recent outing against India at the MCG, he was almost unplayable with 3 for 13 as the ball nipped and bounced. Among bowlers with 100-plus powerplay deliveries this year, Hazlewood has the fifth-best economy rate, of 6.72.

Ellis: the variation king

You can’t discuss Australia’s pace attack without mentioning Ellis. After biding his time for an extended run in the team he has grasped it with both hands. Against India he took nine wickets – the most for Australia in a bilateral series – at an economy rate of 8.02. While known for his death bowling, Ellis is now trusted at any stage.Ellis’ hallmark is variation – he has a full range of slower balls – but he can be sharp when he wants to, as he showed with the bouncer to Abhishek Sharma in Hobart. Across 12 matches since the West Indies tour, he has 18 wickets and has only once gone for more than 40, but Ellis tries to distance himself from the numbers.”I think the role I’m doing now, and it’s hard in a stat-based game, but I really try not to live and die on the numbers,” Ellis said. “I think there’ll be games where I bowl one in the powerplay and three at the death and I might bowl well and go for heaps. I think that comes with the role. I’m really trying to not associate a good night or a bad night with numbers.”

Places up for debate

Injuries could yet play their part, but the majority of Australia’s likely World Cup squad appear locked in. Green will return as a middle-order option and, fitness permitting, offer another pace option. Ben Dwarshuis should have done enough to secure his spot, especially with fellow left-armer Spencer Johnson still sidelined.One call for the selectors will be whether to carry a specialist reserve wicketkeeper. If so, Matthew Short or Mitchell Owen could be squeezed out. If Cummins isn’t available, one pace-bowling slot could open up. The upcoming BBL season could could be a chance for 50-50 players to sway the selectors.Possible T20 World Cup squadMitchell Marsh (capt), Travis Head, Josh Inglis (wk), Cameron Green, Tim David, Marcus Stoinis, Glenn Maxwell, Matt Short, Alex Carey, Ben Dwarshuis, Nathan Ellis, Josh Hazlewood, Adam Zampa, Matt Kuhnemann, Xavier Bartlett/Pat Cummins.

BBC broadcaster on his involvement in English cricket and the fight for its future

Matt Roller07-Feb-2024How do you solve a problem like the Hundred? It is the question that has dominated meetings between the ECB – and in particular, chief executive Richard Gould and chairman Richard Thompson – and the first-class counties this winter, which have centred on the ownership model, the number of teams and the prospect of private investment.If those discussions have been productive, then there remains an oversight: they have hardly – if at all – featured the people actually involved in running the competition. “I haven’t had a single conversation with the ECB’s hierarchy since this lot took over,” says Mark Chapman, best known as a respected broadcaster across English sport but also the chair of Manchester Originals’ board since the team’s inception nearly five years ago.”The eighteen first-class counties put Richard Gould and Richard Thompson in their jobs, so they’re going to talk to them: I get that. But I would have thought, at some point… I mean, you’re sat here now, talking to me now about how it’s gone and what the future is, so why would they not talk to those that are involved in the Hundred?”Chapman, who has worked extensively for the BBC and, more recently, Sky Sports, cut his teeth as a young broadcaster covering Durham in 1997. Working for BBC Radio Newcastle, he travelled home and away with a team captained by David Boon, and recalls fondly the celebrations as they broke a long winless streak at Darlington Cricket Club.But his principal association is with Lancashire and in 2019, when studying for a Masters degree in sporting directorship at Manchester Metropolitan University, he was put in touch with the county’s chief executive, Daniel Gidney. “He said they were helping the ECB put a board together for Manchester Originals and asked if I’d be interested,” Chapman recalls.The Originals were – and remain – the only Hundred team with a single county affiliated to them, a situation which led them to appoint an independent board to mitigate fears that conflicts of interest could arise; Gidney is unusual among chief executives in that he has no official involvement in the Hundred team affiliated to his county.Old Trafford under the floodlights during the 2023 Hundred•Getty ImagesChapman chairs a board which comprises James Sheridan (Knights plc, and a non-executive board member at Lancashire), Fiona Morgan (SailGP) and Amy Townsend (Freddie’s Flowers), while Sanjeev Katwa, Tottenham Hotspur’s head of technology, is an advisor. “The diversity of thought around that table is massive,” he says.In 2021, the Hundred’s inaugural season, “we didn’t really know what we were doing,” Chapman admits. “We were still operating in the Covid landscape and it was a case of thinking, ‘Right, let’s just try and get this thing on the road. We only really got a grasp on the whole thing once that first year was done.”Since then, he believes that the Originals have developed “much more of a Manchester feel” and gives much of the credit to their mid-20s marketing manager, Josh Dooler. “The work he has done within Manchester’s communities on behalf of the Originals over the last two years has been absolutely phenomenal,” Chapman says. “I think this is relevant when people slam the competition and say this, that and the other.”Last year, we sold 60,000 tickets [for four home matchdays] which is 10,000 more than the year before. 30% of our ticket-buyers are female, 22% went to Under-16s, and 48% of people who bought tickets for our games in 2023 had never been to a cricket match before. And we reached 5,000 people via community engagements in non-traditional cricket areas.”They are impressive numbers, but do they vindicate the Hundred’s start-up costs and its effect on the rest of the English summer? “The honest answer is I don’t think we’ll know for 10, even 15 years,” Chapman says. “If Lancashire’s average crowd for the Blast drops by 500, but we sell 60,000 Hundred tickets and 300 more girls take up in South Manchester as a result, does that balance it out?”I genuinely have no idea – and it’s very difficult to measure. But I didn’t come up with the Hundred. Obviously, I didn’t have to work in it either, but I genuinely love cricket and I genuinely want cricket to be a successful sport, enjoyed by as many people as people, because it’s given me and my family such enjoyment over the years.”I can see why people are in different camps with the Hundred. I’m 50 years old: I’m a traditionalist when it comes to cricket, but I work in a lot of different sports. I cover the NFL; I go and watch netball with one of my daughters. I adore Lancashire and the County Championship, but I can also see why some things have moved on or developed.”Related

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Chapman believes that the Originals have found a balance between an inclusive atmosphere – “last year, 30% of our ground was alcohol-free zones” – and Emirates Old Trafford’s raucous party stand. “In British sport in general, you have to try to find a balance between family-friendly fun and pissed blokes dressed as bananas on a stag do,” he says.He also believes that the Originals have been front-runners among Hundred teams in pioneering a ‘two teams, one club’ approach: “We’ve been big on integrating the men’s and women’s side of it.” He cites as an example their decision to convert the away dressing-room at Old Trafford into the women’s home one, leaving away teams to change in the indoor school.But Chapman fears that the progress that has been made towards cricket becoming an equal-gender sport is being overlooked during discussions about the Hundred’s future – hence his frustration at the fact that he has not been consulted by the ECB’s leadership. “All of these discussions that I’m reading about only seem to be looking at men’s cricket,” he says.One early proposal – which was never likely to succeed – involved the Hundred becoming a 39-team pyramid including the national (formerly minor) counties. “I mean, my God!” Chapman says. “You arguably can’t have a 39-team pyramid in the men’s game, but you definitely can’t have it in the women’s game at the moment because the depth just isn’t there.”There have to be safeguards to guarantee the continued progression of the women’s game. Everybody involved in the Hundred has worked really hard to get to a certain point, but we’re miles off where we need to be, and that’s because of the historical treatment of women’s team sport in this country. It’s going to take a long time, but there is work being done – which shouldn’t be undone.”He believes that handing equity stakes to host counties could work – “Daniel Gidney has been absolutely phenomenal, not in supporting us, but accommodating what we want to do with the Originals” – and is open to the principle of private investment, which might better enable the women’s Hundred to attract “the top Aussies” with higher salaries, though he has some broader concerns.”I’ll give you an example: in 2022, we lost a bowler in our men’s team to injury and looked at a couple of bowlers – John Turner at Hampshire, and Danny Lamb at Lancashire – as replacements. We had a final group game and then the eliminator, and we were looking to bring someone in, but they’d have missed the semi-finals of the One-Day Cup.”We had a long think about it and said, ‘do you know what? Go and play your 50-over semi-finals’. That was why we had a squad of 15 in the first place, and Tom Lammonby came into the side and did well. Sometimes when the Hundred gets hammered I think, ‘we are trying to be fair’. And the worry is that if private investment comes in, that could easily blow county cricket apart.”Chapman comfortably fills an hour discussing the Hundred and its future, and it is immediately clear to see that he is desperate for it to be a success. But the irony is that when it comes to dealing with the ECB, a ubiquitous broadcaster is struggling to get his voice heard.

Lancashire seamer is back for his sixth Finals Day in seven years

Paul Edwards15-Jul-2022Superheroes and supervillains come in various forms and have various monikers. There is The Terminator and The Exterminator and probably many others, most of them attached to seriously dreadful films.Luke Wood’s performances for the three counties he has represented on Finals Day have often been rather heroic and he has been at Edgbaston for English cricket’s biggest hogfeast for five successive years from 2016 to 2020. So with due acknowledgement to Lancashire’s physio, Sam Byrne, residents in south-west Birmingham should know that coming on Saturday to a cricket ground near them will be…The Denominator.It is a wonderfully low-key name for one of the county game’s most high-voltage cricketers. Watch Wood steam in to bowl deliciously laser-guided bouncers at well-set openers and you might think that he has more in common with Ted Hughes’ hawk. His manners are also tearing off heads.On Saturday, though, Wood will discipline the formidable skills that have already earned him an England one-day call-up this season, although not yet an international appearance. (He might just as well have spent his week in the Netherlands going round the Rijksmuseum.) Wood will play in the morning semi-final, hoping that the first time a T20 Roses match takes place on Finals Day is also the prelude to Lancashire’s appearance in the evening.Supporters from Manchester and its surrounds know all too well that losing that opening game is like being thrown out of a party before the decent booze arrives. Wood has had similar experiences; he was in the Nottinghamshire team that seemed certain to beat Worcestershire in 2019, only to lose the game in a final over no-one quite believed.”Losing that game was hard but a lot of learnings came out of it,” Wood told ESPNcricinfo. “And it’s important to remember that it’s not always about the last ball and one player. It can also be about saving that one run in the field at a point in the game when you can’t know what the consequences of that will be.”Related

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Wood’s experience of five Finals Days – although he was simply a Nottinghamshire squad member for the first two – may be useful in helping the younger members of Lancashire’s team cope with English cricket’s longest day. For example, it is impossible, useless and probably debilitating to try to maintain anything like the same level of concentration throughout the day, even if victory in the first game affords you such an opportunity. Ian Bell was wont to play nine holes’ golf at his local course but Wood’s approach is a little more conventional.”If you want to go back to the hotel, you can, but most players stick around, have some food and watch the other game for a bit,” he said. “Not everyone will want to watch more cricket but you can always take things out of the second semi: how the pitch is deteriorating, for example, or how people are playing. There isn’t a massive turnaround between the semi-final and the final but it’s a long day if you’re there from the build-up to the first semi-final to the end of the final. You can only stay in the changing-rooms until you get chucked out.”There are, however, two new elements to Finals Day this year. The first is that the event is being tightly sandwiched between two rounds of County Championship matches. On Thursday evening Lancashire, Yorkshire and Somerset were all involved in tightly-contested four-day games. It is, as it were, rather more than 110 miles between the idyllic surroundings of Trafalgar Road, Southport, the venue for Lancashire and Somerset’s match, and Edgbaston. Hampshire had the slight advantage of having beating Gloucestershire quite early on Thursday.”We’ll go down to Edgbaston on Friday and have a training slot,” said Wood. “Some people will have played in the game at Southport, so if they feel they need to do some white-ball training, they will and if others need a break, they’ll probably get one. People will simply get what they need ahead of the big day on Saturday.”Wood (far left) celebrates winning the Blast with Worcestershire in 2018•Getty ImagesThe other problem is that a clash with England’s ODI series against India means Lancashire will be without Jos Buttler and Liam Livingstone, two of six players who are unavailable for their respective counties on Saturday. Matt Parkinson and Phil Salt have been released to play but the schedule gives a clear impression that the Blast’s showpiece occasion has been devalued – something that cannot be said of the Hundred, which has been given a window for its own knockout stages in early September.The question of the England players is an interesting one,” Wood said. “I imagine that before Finals Day they’ll know the team for Sunday’s One-Day International at Emirates Old Trafford and I want the best for all the Lancashire players in the England team. But if they’re not playing for England, they’re certainly big players for us. So on the one hand, you want them back; on the other, you want them to play well for England.”It’s tough one because it doesn’t affect every county. The chief ones have been Yorkshire, Surrey and Lancashire this year, but at least it does show the depth of our squad. On the other hand, it’s a bit of a shame because supporters might say their team has lost big games because they didn’t have certain players available. We’ll never moan about not having players available, we’ll just put out the best team we can and try and win every game. But that may not be an outsider’s perspective on it. The fans may not be happy that you’re losing X, Y and Z but that’s the way it is.”

And how many batsmen have scored twin hundreds in a match in which no other batsman has managed even one?

Shiva Jayaraman and Bharath Seervi21-May-202055 Number of times Sachin Tendulkar was the highest run scorer for India in all-out team innings – the most by a batsman in Tests. Two others have done it over 50 times: Brian Lara (53) and Shivnarine Chanderpaul (52). Sunil Gavaskar (38) and Allan Border (37) complete the top five.ESPNcricinfo Ltd34.42 Percentage of times Don Bradman was the highest run scorer in his team’s all-out innings – 21 out of 61 – the highest among all batsmen with a minimum of 50 all-out innings. Among players who batted in over 100 all-out innings for their teams, Lara has the best percentage (27.46%) of being the top run scorer – 53 out of 193. Gavaskar (26.95%), Joe Root (24.24%), AB de Villiers (24.03%) and Tendulkar (23.70%) are the others in the top five with a minimum of 100 innings.10.37 Percentage of Carl Hooper’s innings that were the top scores for his team – 14 out of 135 – the lowest such rate among all batsmen who batted 100 or more times in completed innings in the top six. Mark Waugh is only slightly better, with 16 top scores in 145 all-out innings (11.03%). Among those who batted 100 or more times in completed innings in the top four positions, Sanath Jayasuriya has the lowest percentage (9.80%) of top scores – ten out of 102.7 Number of times Lara’s centuries were the only 50-plus score in a completed innings for West Indies – the most by a batsman. Tendulkar has scored six such hundreds for India. Five batsmen have scored four centuries each in these circumstances: Colin Cowdrey, Graham Gooch, Desmond Haynes, Rahul Dravid, and Virat Kohli.ESPNcricinfo Ltd7* Instances of a batsman scoring a century with no other player reaching fifty in the Test from either side, in matches where all four innings were played. John Reid (100 v England), Dilip Vengsarkar (102 v England), Graeme Wood (100 v England), Ian Botham (114 v India), Andy Flower (113 not out v West Indies), Kumar Sangakkara (157 not out v West Indies) and Dimuth Karunaratne (158 v SA) are the seven batsmen to have done so. Five batsmen have been the only centurion in similar circumstances when three innings of the match were played: Henry Wood, Arthur Hill, Hanif Mohammad, Denis Lindsay, and Matthew Hayden.6 Instances of a batsman’s double-century being the only 50-plus score in a Test innings. Dudley Nourse (231 v Australia), Len Hutton (202 b West Indies), Arthur Morris (206 v England), Dennis Amiss (262 v West Indies), Marvan Atapattu (216 not out v Zimbabwe), and Lara (226 v Australia) hold this distinction.