Finch: Selectors may have to ‘cherry pick’ Hazlewood’s Tests

After picking up a mild side strain in Perth which kept him out of Adelaide, Hazlewood returned for the third Test in Brisbane but pulled up with a calf strain during the warm-ups on the fourth day. He bowled one over, which was effectively a fitness test, before leaving for scans which confirmed the extent of the injury.

After a run of ten consecutives Tests starting from Old Trafford in last year’s Ashes through to the first match of this series, this is a return to the pattern that disrupted Hazlewood’s career between 2021 and 2023 where he played just four Tests in a two-year period.

“With Hazlewood he’s getting injured more and more regularly so that would be a real concern,” Finch told ESPN’s Around The Wicket. “Think there’s an opportunity to maybe even cherry pick the games that he plays in the future. Everyone knows he’s in that best three bowlers in Australia, or best four adding Nathan Lyon, but you need him on the park… [So, Australia might have to consider] picking the best conditions for Josh Hazlewood to have an impact and rotate the rest around that.”

Australia’s big three quicks – Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Pat Cummins – played all Tests last summer against Pakistan, West Indies and New Zealand. The selectors have never really embraced rotation for purely workload management, although they did rest Hazlewood for the Headingley Test in the middle of the 2023 Ashes

“We field the same question every year – if you’re fit, you play and if you’re not, you don’t play. It’s as simple as that, no one rests a Test match,” Hazlewood said before the series.

However, Callum Ferguson believes it’s a policy that may need to be revisited in order to extend the careers of the quick bowlers.

“It’s really important these next couple of years for the Australian cricket team with regards the fast-bowling cartel because they’re not spring chickens anymore,” Ferguson told Around The Wicket. “And even the guys coming in behind aren’t the youngest either when you think of Scott Boland, Michael Neser, who is out with a hamstring injury at the moment as well, so we need to start thinking what’s the best way to maximise the impact of these guys and how do we elongate their careers.

“We don’t want them to play less cricket, we want them to play more and I think a rotation policy might be the best way forward here because those five or six quicks are really, really good, and are up to it so let’s try and elongate their careers and rotating might be the best way forward.”

Cummins, meanwhile, was confident he and Mitchell Starc would be able to back up in Melbourne and Sydney with the regular rain breaks in Brisbane having compensated for the extra workload in Hazlewood’s absence.

“Nothing is for certain, we’ll see how we pull up. But today we’re fine and I can’t imagine that changing,” Cummins said. “We’re feeling really good, it was hot [Tuesday] but we’d had about seven days or so off bowling after Adelaide so we were fresh and ready to go.”

Hazlewood’s next chance to play Tests could come in Sri Lanka at the end of January although that may depend on whether Cummins misses either or both matches for the birth of his second child because Australia are highly unlikely to field more than two quicks in Galle.

Assistant coach Daniel Vettori admitted Hazlewood was “despondent” after the latest setback and spoke of his frustrations as he flew back to Sydney on Thursday.

“Ticked every box heading into the Test; I can understand if it’s my side again and a little bit underdone, but it’s just a random calf strain,” Hazlewood told Channel 7 at Adelaide airport. “Obviously [we’ll] do a deep dive into it and see what we can come up with but feels a pretty random sort of injury.

“I’ve had a little history of sides and calves, they are probably the two things that have kept me out for the majority of the last four years, but I [can] sort of just keep adding another layer to the defence hopefully. I’ve ticked a lot of boxes in the last 12 months and it’s just the timing again – they are only little two or three-week injuries, it’s just the timing of it and missing big games so that’s probably the frustrating thing.”