Australia's head coach Andrew McDonald has claimed that opening batter David Warner is fully in plans for the World Test championship final. Warner has been struggling for scoring runs on a consistent basis recently and was out of colour in the recently concluded Border-Gavaskar series in India. The opener had earlier also spoken about his future and expressed his desire to play for the country till 2024.
Meanwhile, coach McDonald feels that Warner shall be played in the WTC final against India in June. "I think you work through that conversation, and how each player finishes is always different. Some want to go out in a certain way, and others are OK with potentially being dropped out of sides. But at the moment Dave’s fully in our plans for the World Test Championship, he’s coming back for the one-day series, and he’s recovered from his injury there, so we’ll see Dave back in Australian colours on the 17th and we’ll go from there," McDonald said.
Australia are set to play the WTC final, the Ashes and the ODI World Cup in the coming months. The coach also opened up on his team's packed schedule. We are continually talking to our senior players with what they have coming up. Juggling the schedule that’s in front of us. We are staring down 274 days on the road – 144 for the red-ball team, 130 for the white-ball team," he added.
Australia played three series in the WTC 2021-23 cycle in Asian conditions. They travelled to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India and booked the top spot in the WTC standings. McDonald is pleased with his team topping the WTC standings but is not too impressed with the Border Gavaskar trophy result as they went down by 1-2. “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, but in saying that, we didn’t achieve what we wanted to here in India," he added.
