Shane Warne unhappy with Australia for not including a spinner

Australian spinner Shane Warne complained about the lack of a frontline spinner in Australia’s XI against Sri Lanka at the Oval. With Marcus Stoinis still sidelined, Australia has opted against playing either of Adam Zampa or Nathan Lyon for the second straight match. It has instead picked a four-pronged pace attack with part-time off-spinner Glenn Maxwell the most proven of the tweakers in the team.

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Saturday’s match is going to be played on a fresh Oval deck under grey overhead conditions and the Australians are hoping their quicks will once again do the job. Whether or not that proves the case, Warne believes Australia had made a mistake.

Australia cannot win the World Cup without a spinner: Warne

Warne said a leading Australian media network that the Oval had always turned, even if it was a fresh new pitch. He hated having no spinner in the team saying there was going to be a big partnership at some stage and without a spinner, there was no variation. Warne was unhappy with the decision of calling up left-arm seamer Jason Behrendorff for the rested Nathan Coulter-Nile when Lyon was ready to play. He said Australia cannot win the World Cup without a spinner.

He has asked the administrators in Australian Cricket to schedule the Future Tour Programme (FTP) in a better way in order to ensure that the careers of modern-day cricketers are not hampered by injuries.

He also stressed on the importance of workload management saying that the bottom line was they had to play too much cricket and that was just too much. He said that it was too much to expect an international cricketer to play one-day cricket, Twenty20, Test cricket, all those sorts of things. They were playing two-Test series to cram it all in and it was ridiculous, according to him.

Warne suggested that three-match Test series was the way to go. He said that South Africa series was one-all, New Zealand series was one-all. It would have been great to have a three-Test series, but Cricket Australia (CA) just kept cramming all those games in by having only two-match Test series. It was absolutely wrong, he added.

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Australia will take on the visiting Sri Lanka team in the first T20I of the three-match series on October 27 at 9:00 AM (IST). Aaron Finch will lead the Australian team. Sri Lanka are high on confidence coming on the back of an impeccable performance where they whitewashed Pakistan 3-0 in the T20 series in their own backyard.

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