Colombo, Feb 11 (IANS) Australia have won the toss and elected to bat in their 2026 T20 World Cup campaign opener against Ireland here at the R. Premadasa Stadium on Wednesday.
Travis Head is captaining Australia for the match after Mitchell Marsh missed the encounter due to injury.
After winning the toss, Australia captain Travis Head said, “Yeah, there have been a couple (niggles), unfortunately. Marsh copped a blow at training a couple of days ago, and no one’s been willing to massage it out for him. So he’s the unfortunate one. The rest is the same. We should have a couple of boys back for our Pakistan series. But yeah, it’s a strong team, and we’re looking forward to it.”
“We spoke as a group, probably 18 months ago, about a 19-block game series leading into this. So we’ve looked at those 19 games as a block. The Pakistan series didn’t go our way, but we’ve got an opportunity now. We’ve been playing some really good cricket over the last 12 to 18 months, and that becomes important in a tournament like this,” he added.
After losing the toss, Paul Stirling said, “We would have batted as well, to be honest. Look, the games come thick and fast. We haven’t had much time to train things through. So it’s about a fresh start again. There were some obvious errors that we’ll try to cut out today.”
“Having played here in our last game, knowing the conditions hopefully works to our advantage. From our perspective, I think it does. We don’t take anything away from the Australian side, but knowing the conditions and how the pitch might react probably gives us a slight edge. We’ve gone with the same side,” he added.
Playing XIs
Australia: Josh Inglis (wk), Travis Head (c), Cameron Green, Matt Renshaw, Marcus Stoinis, Glenn Maxwell, Cooper Connolly, Xavier Bartlett, Nathan Ellis, Adam Zampa, Matthew Kuhnemann
Ireland: Paul Stirling (c), Ross Adair, Harry Tector, Lorcan Tucker (wk), Curtis Campher, Benjamin Calitz, George Dockrell, Gareth Delany, Mark Adair, Barry McCarthy, Matthew Humphreys
–IANS
bc/
