Josh Hazlewood will make his return to Australia’s XI for the third Test of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy against India after recovering from the side strain that kept him out in Adelaide. Captain Pat Cummins confirmed that Scott Boland would be replaced by Hazlewood at the Gabba.
Hazlewood replacing Boland is the only alteration to the home side’s XI that defeated India by 10 wickets in Adelaide, leveling the series at 1-1.
“He’s had no hiccups,” Cummins told reporters on Friday. “He had a really good bowl yesterday, he had another bowl in Adelaide a couple of days previously. Him and the medical team are really confident.”
Cummins admitted that he had to halt Hazlewood’s bowling in the first Test in Perth to avoid aggravating the injury. The 33-year-old sustained a slight strain to the same side that has troubled him in recent years but was still able to carry on bowling.
“It was later on in that second innings,” said Cummins. “Fair to say we probably thought the game was starting to slip away. We still needed six or seven wickets and we were about 400 behind. We’ve seen it a few times where Josh has pushed through to get through a Test match and a little bit of soreness turns into a month or two of injury”.
“So we made the call then that it probably wasn’t worth the risk of keeping him bowling. I think he bowled an extra two overs leading into a tea break and he said it felt ok, but I just kind of thought from there, ‘that’s enough’.”
Australia XI for third Test: Usman Khawaja, Nathan McSweeney, Marnus Labuschagne, Steve Smith, Travis Head, Mitch Marsh, Alex Carey (wk), Pat Cummins, Mitch Starc, Nathan Lyon, Josh Hazlewood
Third Test: December 14-18, The Gabba, Brisbane
Australia squad: Pat Cummins (c), Sean Abbott, Scott Boland, Alex Carey (wk), Brendan Doggett, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Usman Khawaja, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Mitch Marsh, Nathan McSweeney, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Beau Webster
India squad: Rohit Sharma (c), Jasprit Bumrah (vc), Yashasvi Jaiswal, KL Rahul, Abhimanyu Easwaran, Devdutt Padikkal, Shubman Gill, Virat Kohli, Rishabh Pant, Sarfaraz Khan, Dhruv Jurel, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Mohammed Siraj, Akash Deep, Prasidh Krishna, Harshit Rana, Nitish Kumar Reddy, Washington Sundar. Reserves: Mukesh Kumar, Navdeep Saini, Khaleel Ahmed, Yash Dayal
Jasir Basharat is a cricket enthusiast capturing the heart of the game through insightful analysis and storytelling sharing his passion for the sport through engaging narratives. He is a business graduate from University of Kashmir.
