Australia are – almost unthinkably – leaving a global tournament at the group stage. Did they put too much emphasis on the Ashes – which they dominated – and not enough on the T20 World Cup? McDonald said there was no such compromise.
“We’ve been fully locked into this World Cup for a period of time – this is one of our priorities,” McDonald said on Thursday. “I have heard that sort of narrative that T20 World Cups don’t matter to us. I think all that is a response to the performances of Australian cricket teams in these competitions. I think we won the one in 2021 and we haven’t been as successful since that point in time and the expectations on the Australian cricket team are high and rightfully so. But to sit back and say that we’re prioritising other formats or other versions of the game and not the T20 World Cup is entirely false.”
Australia’s top seven for this tournament had seemingly been built around power hitting, though their opponents have used different methods to rack up scores in Sri Lankan conditions. McDonald didn’t think his team had the wrong set of skills for these surfaces.
“I think it’s unfair to say that we’ve put all our eggs in the basket of power when you talk about some of the quality players we’ve got in there – Cameron Green and Travis Head and Josh Inglis and Mitch Marsh,” McDonald said. “I name those players because they’ve played Test cricket. So I think if you’re playing Test cricket, you do have the skills to combat most conditions. People will easily say that we invested in the power, but we felt like we had the balance across that batting unit to get the job done in these conditions.”
He did, however, make the point that injuries sustained in one format have translated into the lack of availability in others.
“Have we had some challenges on the back of injuries from players on the back of Test series? That’s always something we deal with and every nation has to deal with. It’s very difficult to be high performing across three formats. At times things cross over and definitely get in the way in terms of injuries and workload and those types of things.”
“Really the tale of the tape is that we’ve had a lot of players not performing at once, which for this group has been rare. You think back across the journey, and we’ve always had two key contributors with the bat, and that has given us the totals.
“On the bowling front, it’s easy to look at who we haven’t got here, and yeah, that does destabilise you to some degree, but the guys that have had the opportunity here are good enough. Where we leave this tournament is with the knowledge that we were good enough and we’re incredibly disappointed that we weren’t able to take those opportunities and get ourselves to the next phase of the tournament.”
