Pat Cummins sides with suggestions of larger squad at World Cups

There are quite a few teams that find themselves in a tricky situation. One of them is New Zealand, and the other is Australia, who are currently down to 13 players for their much-awaited clash against England on Saturday (November 4). 

With Glenn Maxwell out due to a freak injury and Mitchell Marsh heading back home to Perth for a family reason, Australia have just a 13-player pool from which they must select a XI for their next clash. Australian captain Pat Cummins insisted that the International Cricket Council (ICC) should allow teams to carry more players for such a global tournament. 

“Yeah, to be honest, I mean, it's a two-month tournament. You wouldn't want to be in a position where, say, somewhere like a team like New Zealand have had some injuries and luckily, they've been able to hold someone like Kane in the squad but if suddenly you had to rule him out - I think that wouldn't be good for a cricket or a World Cup,” Cummins said ahead of Australia’s clash against England.

“It's not like you can poach players from other countries, so I always kind of think as many players as you need, you should be able to pick from,” he added. 

Cummins’ comments come days after Glenn Phillips’ comments, with the New Zealand all-rounder insisting that a squad of 15 is perhaps the ‘ideal’ size for such an event and wasn’t too fazed by the injuries. 

“No, I think a squad of 15 is perfect. We're close enough anywhere in the world to fly someone in at any stage if you really absolutely need to,” Phillips had said earlier. 

Australia have been forced to swap and change their XI every game, owing to either injuries or combination. Cummins insisted that one day as a format is such high-intensity that injuries often play a huge role. 

“To be honest once the tournament started, we kind of thought we'd have 15 available. But  one day cricket more than any other format, you have injuries, it's high intensity, it's games are close together. So, we always knew there was going to be a certain amount of attrition,” Cummins insisted. 

“I mean, the good thing is we're still three games away from the semis. We need to obviously make the semifinals, but hopefully this is kind of the last little kind of hiccup where we've got a smaller squad to pick from and then once we get closer, we've got a full squad.”

Fickle format has cost England

There was, however, no love lost between Cummins and his rivals on Saturday, England, whose results have surprised him. The all-rounder also insisted that these global tournaments are sometimes ‘pretty fickle’ which makes it tough to read into. 

“Yeah, a little bit surprised, they've obviously got some class players and performed really well in these kind of tournaments over the last few years,” Cummins on England’s poor show at the World Cup. 

“A little bit surprised in terms of what's gone wrong, probably not for me to say, these tournaments are pretty fickle you see it in T20 tournament around the world, sometimes the best-looking teams just don't start off well and then find it hard to kind of gain ground so yeah,” he added.

Cummins also confirmed that Maxwell will be back for the clash against Afghanistan and also hinted at Marsh returning back to India at a later point in the tournament. 

“Maxi's hopefully for the clash against Afghanistan, so he'll just miss this one. But he's trained well yesterday and still taking it day by day, but hoping he'll just miss this one and then Mitch we'll wait and see - he'll definitely come back I don't think it'll be a super long trip back home to Perth but yeah main thing is he's back home and we'll give him as much time and space as he needs,” Cummins said. 

While the Australian captain kept a tight lid over the playing XI for the clash against England, he reckoned that there wouldn’t be too many surprises. 

“It's one of the 11 or the 13. Yeah, find out tomorrow. But I don't think it'll be too many surprises.”