The enormous priority being placed on taking down arch rival India next summer could mean boom batter Cameron Green skips white-ball cricket for Australia and instead plays Sheffield Shield after the recent success of following a similar plan.
Green has become a three-format player for Australia, having played recent ODIs against the West Indies, but was left out of the T20s to instead play for Western Australia in his last hitout before the Test tour of New Zealand.
He scored an unbeaten century in Tasmania and the evidence of that working as the perfect preparation was clear with Green’s massive unbeaten, match-high 174 in Australia’s big opening Test win in Wellington.
It was the confidence booster Green needed after struggling in his first few innings after being elevated to No.4 in the batting line-up.
Given how well it worked, and the importance of the Indian series at home, Australian coach Andrew McDonald has flagged the idea of leaving Green out of scheduled ODIs and T20Is against Pakistan that will begin the next home summer.
McDonald said “flipping between the formats” hadn’t been kind to 24-year-old Green and next summer’s Test series was incredibly important.
The Australians have not beaten India in a Test series for a decade, which includes India’s past two visits to Australia in 2018-19 and 2020-21.
“He’s become an all-three format player and we thought his greatest challenge was flipping between the formats,” McDonald said of Green’s increasing worth.
“We felt that by keeping Cam in one format for a period of time gave him the best chance, and that won’t always be the case with everyone.
“Other players can go (more readily) from one-day international cricket into Test cricket, and it’s probably the more experienced players who have done it over a period of time.
“It’s a big decision to leave anyone out of international cricket when they’re potentially in the best 11, so I’m glad he embraced that when we had that conversation with him, and the return on it is pretty immediate.
“The next stress point on that will be next summer, leading into the Indian Test series where we’ve got Pakistan in ODI cricket and T20 cricket.
“I’d like to probably err on the side of preparing him through red-ball – we know how good a white-ball player he is, so you put a priority on what it looks like next summer.
“The white-ball cricket’s important, but geez that Test summer’s important, so I think with the results he’s had (at Wellington) he’ll probably come to us and say ‘can you give us a couple of Shield games before the first Test against India’?.”
McDonald said Green, who was dropped during the Ashes before being drafted back in amid a reshuffle with Steve Smith elevated to open, was clearly in the best six batters in Australia, as shown by his second Test century
“His preferred position, as we’ve seen in Shield cricket, is No.4 and we think he can be a long-term option there,” McDonald said
“This is a big step towards that. The conversations are that he’s a quality player, and the statistics that everyone was looking at early in his (international) career probably didn’t reflect the player that was in front of us.
“I think we’ve seen a snapshot of that now, and the public has been able to see what we’ve seen over a period of time.”
