Smith stays in charge
Cummins to remain in Australia after death of his mother
STEVE Smith will be acting captain of the ODI side after Pat Cummins made the decision to remain with his family.
Cummins returned home half way through the Border Gavaskar Trophy to be with mother Maria, who died on the eve of the fourth match.
“Pat won’t be coming back, he’s still taking care of what’s happened back home,” coach Andrew McDonald said. “Our thoughts are with Pat and his family as they go through that grieving process.”
Cummins will not be replaced in the squad, but Nathan Ellis has come in for the injured Jhye Richardson.
The Australians have a three-match series against India beginning in Mumbai on Friday.
Australia lost the Test series 2-1 and, while happy with only the second win by a visiting team in India in the past decade, knows it let a chance slip.
McDonald conceded the result in the first two Tests were disappointing before the team rallied for the second half.
“I think it’s a good result if you are taking the last two Tests matches but what we set out to achieve here we weren’t quite able to achieve it,” he said. “You can pin it back to Delhi, where we were in control of that game and lost those eight wickets and pretty much the whole series shifted from there.”
McDonald said it was important the group learnt from its failure at Delhi and moved on.
“It’s a proud group and they’ll see it as a missed opportunity. Not many teams come here and get the opportunity like what was presented in Delhi and if it had been 1-1 there who knows how the series goes from there so there’s a lot of what-ifs around that,” he said. “We could only control what we did moving forward and the last two Tests we got some solid performances.”
Australia now has a chance to even the score against India in the World Test Championship at The Oval in London in June.
“(It’s going to be) a lot different,” McDonald said. “We are super excited about that. If you look at what we embarked upon at the start of Pakistan, into Sri Lanka, into India, we set that as three series in the subcontinent.
“We’ve come away from that with three wins, three losses and three draws. And that’s a pretty tough World Test Championship cycle so to finish on top of the table with that on the calendar is pretty impressive and we’re the World No.1, too, so pretty proud of what the team’s been able to achieve.”
The issue for Australia is that players who go right through the IPL tournament will have one week to warm up for the WTC final.
“It will be squeezed,” McDonald admitted.