Australia’s battered and beaten one-day cricket side limped home on Wednesday insisting their World Cup defence was on track despite an unprecedented 3-0 series pasting from the Black Caps in New Zealand
Australia’s winless New Zealand campaign, dubbed a ”blackwash” by the media here, followed two losses to England in the domestic tri-series final, with the five consecutive defeats representing Australia’s worst run in a decade.
Coach John Buchanan, who just last month complained that England and New Zealand were too poor to give his team of champions a competitive hit-out, said there was no need to radically overhaul World Cup preparations.
Buchanan said the Australians would simply put the defeats behind them as they rest for a week, and opening batsman Matthew Hayden undergoes tests on a right big toe fractured by a yorker in Tuesday’s loss to New Zealand.
”There’s no getting away from the fact we’d like to be winning, there’s no doubt about that,” Buchanan told reporters.
”But I’m still very confident about the planning we’ve put in place, the preparations we’ll do when we get there and the team that we’ve got.
”So this is behind us now and we look forward to a week or so away and then heading off to the West Indies.”
Buchanan conceded selectors may need to consider their options once they receive information on a string of injuries including Hayden (toe), Andrew Symonds (torn bicep), Brett Lee (ankle) and Michael Clarke (hip).
”Once we get all that information it’ll then be over to the selectors and Ricky Ponting and myself and we’ll toss that all around and work out what the best solution might be,” he said.
Veteran paceman Glenn McGrath was confident the floundering Australians could turn around their poor form to claim a third consecutive World Cup.
”It wasn’t the best tour for us over there in New Zealand, but we would rather get that out of the way now, a few weeks before World Cup, so we can go to the first game, sit down and work out what we need to do differently and turn it around,” he said.
McGrath blamed Australia’s injury crisis for the loss against the Kiwis and also said he was looking forward to the return of captain Ponting and vice-captain Adam Gilchrist, who were both rested for the New Zealand series.
”We’ve experienced quite a few injuries, five or six of our top players weren’t there, so it’s a bit of a different mix of players there and it sometimes takes a little while to get settled,” he said.
”If you take one or two players out of any other team in the world it would unsettle them, but to take five or six out would really destroy them.”
Former New Zealand captain Martin Crowe said the Australians had their own arrogance to blame for Ponting and Gilchrist’s absence, saying resting the pair was disrespectful to their trans-Tasman rivals.
”If I was leading their campaign I would definitely have my captain in the last three games heading into the World Cup,” he said.
The Australian newspaper labelled the series loss ”depressing” and ”humiliating”, while the Sydney Morning Herald said it was ”a runaway road-train barrelling through the bedroom wall of Australia’s World Cup planners”.
Sydney’s Daily Telegraph showed the depth of concern at Australia’s ”pop-gun bowling attack” when it called for the return of Shane Warne, who has not played international one-day cricket since 2003. – Sapa-AFP