McDonald cautions against rush towards 'regeneration'

The mob dusting off pitchforks demanding regeneration of an ageing Test team after Australia's shock defeat to Bangladesh may be sorely disappointed barring an unforeseen pivot from George Bailey, Andrew McDonald and co.

With six days to regroup before his side faces Bangladesh again, McDonald did not dodge the obvious in the aftermath of the most unexpected result of his four-year tenure and maybe in the nearly 150-year history of Test cricket.

"We were poor this Test match," Australia's head coach said in Darwin. "Any time you score (fewer than) 500 runs over two innings on that surface, we've got to make some improvements. It's tough to accept. We let our standards slip."

Ricky Ponting has been among the voices leading the calls for a selection overhaul, telling Channel Seven yesterday: "I think it's inevitable they have to make change. I was on the record at the end of last summer thinking that this was the ideal time to start to regenerate this team."

But although changes to the hosts' squad for Saturday's second of two Top End Tests beginning in Mackay on Saturday have not been ruled out, the supply of fresh-faced saviours that could be injected into the XI are few and far between.

Ponting identified the opener and first-drop positions currently occupied by Jake Weatherald and Marnus Labuschagne as the spots most in need of "regeneration" early on in Australia's run of up to 21 Tests in 12 months.

"It's always going to be a conversation, the age profile of the team, where we're at, how we're travelling. A loss doesn't help that," said McDonald. "But these players have got a fair bit of cricket left in them, I believe.

"It's just really how we navigate through it. There's always going to be calls for change on the back of a loss. There's going to be an emotion around that from the outside – and even internally. Our guys sit in that change room, and they're feeling it. You feel a Test loss. It means a lot to them to play for Australia, so let's not lose that in all this as well.

"The easy option is to call for change. A lot of people call for change even when we're winning. They're entitled to do that as well on the back of a performance like that. Why wouldn't they? That's part of our lot."

So if change is afoot, the more plausible alternatives, at least in terms of the loose pecking order established by the 13-man squad initially picked for both Bangladesh Tests and a wider 19-man training group that's assembled at camps in Brisbane in recent months, are more seasoned campaigners than the two Victorians Ponting nominated in Campbell Kellaway and Ollie Peake.

Josh Inglis, the 31-year-old reserve batter and wicketkeeper in Darwin, has been the first one in when top-order bats Steve Smith and Usman Khawaja missed Tests over the past 12 months.

While the right-hander has been deployed at No.4 and 7 in those stints and has rarely ventured above No.5 for Western Australia in the Sheffield Shield, selection boss Bailey previous suggested he could bat in the top three. Inglis struck 40 and 125no opening the batting for a Cricket Australia XI against England Lions in November.

Matthew Renshaw, the 30-year-old who made his Test debut a decade ago, is the only regular top-three batter who was part of those camps leading into the Bangladesh series. The 14-Test left-hander scored three hundreds in 10 Shield innings last summer, averaging just shy of 50, but averaged below 30 in the preceding two first-class campaigns with Queensland.

He could be a candidate to be a specific pick for northern Queensland as the only man to have scored two first-class hundreds at Mackay's Harrup Park, the most recent in a 2023 Shield game against Victoria.

Then there is Cooper Connolly – and at 22 he does fit the bill to be the young white knight many desire. He was also part of that 19-man group although Pat Cummins on Sunday had pointed out white-ball players were also mixed in for those preparations.

For now, that's where Connolly has fitted into the picture despite his deployment as a spin-bowling No.8 for a Test against Sri Lanka in Galle last year. The left-hander does boast a recent ton against Bangladesh batting at No.3 – but it came in a dead-rubber bilateral ODI in June.

His first-class record is stronger than other young Australian batters, averaging 44.63 from 21 innings, but has batted at No.4 or above only twice and was dropped by Western Australia in March when he was available for selection as a batter only. Indeed, he has not bowled in a match for five months due to a back stress issue, leaving a question over whether he could play as a fully-fledged allrounder.

Nathan McSweeney is 27 and has been scoring heavily in county one-day and T20 competitions for Northamptonshire in recent weeks. Younger options again are Sam Konstas, the 20-year-old opener who played the last of his five Tests in the Caribbean last year, Kellaway (23) and Peake (19).

None are barging the door down. In fact, only two batters aged 27 or under who batted more than five times last Shield season averaged above 40. One was Australia's best player in Darwin, Cameron Green, the other was Jack Edwards, who has not batted above No.6 in a first-class match in four years.

In terms of under-25 batters, Konstas scored the most heavily in the Shield last season with 660 runs at 33, ahead of Liam Scott (547 at 29), Kellaway (509 at 26.78) and Connolly (216 runs in eight innings at 30.85). Peake is regarded as a prodigy and made his ODI debut earlier this year but remains a longer term work-in-progress in red-ball cricket having made only 323 runs at 23.07 in 17 Shield innings last summer.

As for the bowlers, the only likely change would be Scott Boland replacing one of the 'big four'. "The bowling one's a little bit different because majority of the time it's conditions based, and I would say that there's a physicality potentially to what they do, more so than the batting unit," said McDonald.

"I don't think it's going to be like, 'Oh, we've lost this Test match so then suddenly it's immediately we shift things'. We will work through exactly what we normally work through to come to a conclusion for the best XI that goes out there.

"We're not emotional around change in terms of, 'if we lose a game, then we need change'. It's the ability to think through, 'Okay, what does it look like? How do we maximise our playing group, and how do we get the best out of them?'

"And if change was to be a part of that, it would be us deciding that the team would be better with someone else in there."

McDonald noted that both Weatherald and Labuschagne had made notable technical changes since last summer's Ashes.

With the six-Test Weatherald, the coach suggested it was early enough in the opener's career that a definitive call on the effectiveness of those tweaks were difficult. As for the 64-Test veteran Labuschagne, he conceded that despite his application of his changes in the heat of battle were encouraging, ultimately returns of 1 and 31 were insufficient.

"He's lacked runs. He feels that. We feel that," said McDonald. "We're working incredibly hard as a coaching group … we've got to get the best out of Marn as well. He's had a bit of a lull. He knows that, he's gone to work.

"I think we saw some change in the way that he played, so that's good. So some of that work that he had done feels as though it's stuck up under pressure … but he needs some big runs."

NRMA Insurance Bangladesh Test series

First Test: Bangladesh beat Australia by nine wickets in Darwin

Second Test: August 22-26, Great Barrier Reef Arena, Mackay, 10am (local)

Australia squad: Pat Cummins (c), Scott Boland, Alex Carey, Cameron Green, Josh Hazlewood, Travis Head, Josh Inglis, Marnus Labuschagne, Nathan Lyon, Steve Smith, Mitchell Starc, Jake Weatherald, Beau Webster

Bangladesh squad: Najmul Hossain Shanto (c), Mehidy Hasan Miraz (vc), Soumya Sarkar, Shadman Islam, Tanzid Hasan Tamim, Mominul Haque, Mushfiqur Rahim, Litton Das, Amite Hasan, Jaker Ali, Taijul Islam, Taskin Ahmed, Hasan Mahmud, Syed Khaled Ahmed, Ebadot Chowdhury, Shoriful Islam, Musfik Hasan