Moeen misses tour opener in blow to England build-up

ENGLAND’S plan to field their probable first Test team as quickly as possible on this Ashes tour was dealt a blow yesterday when Moeen Ali was ruled out of tomorrow’s first warm-up here at the WACA with a side injury. Captain Joe Root wants England to be ruthless in the three tour matches before the first Test in Brisbane on November 23 in an attempt to replicate the near perfect build-up by Andrew Strauss’s Ashes winners in 2010-11. Yet he must do so without Moeen, who had an outstanding summer with bat and ball, as well as Steven Finn against a weak looking Western Australia XI in a two-day match that kicks off the biggest of all tours. Moeen was last night awaiting the results of a scan after reporting soreness in his left side while Finn, more of an outsider for Brisbane after replacing Ben Stokes in England’s squad, hurt his left knee while batting in the Perth nets. England are relaxed about both and insist Moeen’s scan is precautionary, but they cannot afford to lose another key component of their lower middleorder engine room on top of the absence of Stokes. With Moeen out tomorrow, Gary Ballance will join Dawid Malan in the middle order in what has the look of an early tour shootout for the No 5 position. Moeen will look to return in place of one of them in Adelaide next week. Craig Overton and Jake Ball are both likely to get the chance to bowl on the bouncy WACA pitch, with England planning to use 12 players in this abbreviated opener. Somerset’s Overton is favourite to claim the last first-Test seam slot. ‘We want to be as ruthless as we can and start as we mean to go on,’ said Root yesterday. ‘We want to give guys the opportunity for time in the middle but not at the expense of losing or not being at our best. We want to get in the winning habit so that when the Tests come around we have belief from what we’ve done in warm-ups. ‘Ideally, you try to play your Test team throughout but we might have to manage the workload of the seamers.’ Australian fast bowler Nathan Coulter-Nile is the only recognisable name in the local team tomorrow, while Cricket Australia have named another weak-looking squad for the next two four-day warm-up games in Adelaide and Townsville.