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The Times of India
The Times of India
Sport
Solomon S Kumar | TNN

Bat dominated ball in the series, so death-overs is really not a concern: McDonald

HYDERABAD: Left-arm spinner Axar Patel came in for praise from none other than Australia coach Andrew McDonald. Axar, who was brought in as a replacement for Ravindra Jadeja, had an impressive series and ended up as the leading wicket-taker with eight scalps to his credit. He was head and shoulders above all the bowlers from both sides.

"Axar, in particular, had an outstanding series. With Jaddu out everyone thought that it might become a bit of a weakness for India, but they've found another one again, which tends to happen," McDonald said on Sunday night.

The Australian attack suffered at the hands of the Indian batters and was a concern for the team going into the World Cup. "Across the series the run rate was high, it was entertaining cricket from the get-go. Bat dominated the ball, so there was really no place to hide for bowling units, in particular death. We worked our way through some plans. We saw some good results with some of the plans that we implemented that might be able to transition to the World Cup," he said.

He added that Australia will have reinforcements in the form of Mitchell Starc when they begin the defence of their World Cup title at home next month. "The connection between here (India) and Australia might be slightly different, a little bit more bounce, different tactics. Mitchell Starc comes back into the picture being one of our best death bowlers. So, we feel like we'll get reinforcements there."

The Australian said the bowlers are suffering because of the skills of the batters. "The conversations are always going to be, can you get better at your death bowling? The answer to that is yes. We encourage our guys to make good decisions and execute them. Sometimes the batter out-executes you and we've seen that with Hardik (Pandya) across the series. Suryakumar Yadav was outstanding today and he's gonna be dangerous in the World Cup, but he showed what he can do." McDonald said.

Coming in with some key players sidelined due to injuries, Australia was without a few of their World Cup-bound players. However, the coach feels the defending champions have enough depth in the side. "It's fortuitous that some of the guys got the opportunity here. We got a couple of injuries which are concerning leading into a World Cup. You don't like to see some of your mainstay players out of the team leading in, but we feel as though we've got some good options in depth."

"It's probably opportunistic the way that he's (Cameron Green) come into the opening position with obviously David Warner not being here and a couple of other players from our World Cup 15. And that's all you can do, given an opportunity... Before we came over here, we thought he had the skill sets to be able to succeed there, and he's taken on some of the best bowlers in world cricket," McDonald said in praise of Green, who topped the batting charts for both sides with 118 runs to his credit.

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