The writing is on the wall for Darren Lehmann’s international cricket career and he won’t tour England with the Australian team later this year, former batsman Mark Waugh said on Monday.
Waugh also says England don’t believe they can beat Australia in the five-Test series.
Lehmann was dropped from Australia’s one-day team for the current New Zealand tour and Waugh said he expects the 35-year-old South Australian left-hander also to miss the Ashes tour of England, starting at Lord’s on July 21.
”I don’t think he will go to England. The Australian selectors are looking at younger players,” Waugh told the South Australian Press Club in Adelaide on Monday. ”He’s a great player and a great team man but I think, unfortunately, age has probably just caught up with him.”
Waugh, the twin brother of former Australian skipper Steve Waugh, expected a ”pretty easy” Australian triumph in the Ashes.
”England might have a chance but I don’t know if they believe in themselves against Australia,” he said. ”They could take a Test off us, but I think something like three- or four-one will be the result.”
Waugh was also vocal about Australian cricket’s contentious rotation player policy and said he is not in favour of the Australian policy of resting players from one-day fixtures.
”I don’t think it works. It didn’t work four or five years ago, so I don’t know why they brought it back in,” he said.
”I remember being rotated against Zimbabwe two or three times — and I was batting pretty well and there was probably a lot of runs to be scored against Zimbabwe.
”At the end of the season, you sit down with the selectors and they are sorting out your contract, and where we were rated with other players, and I remember them saying ‘you have had a fair year but you haven’t scored as many runs as we would have liked’.
”I felt like saying ‘well, you shouldn’t have rotated me against Zimbabwe’.”
Waugh remains Australia’s leading one-day run scorer and the third most prolific Australian Test run scorer behind his brother and Allan Border. — Sapa-AFP