Wood’s importance to England bid to win the Ashes for the first time since 2015 cannot be overstated. <\/p>\n
They want a group of bowlers capable of generating high pace in Australia and Wood, who has had a number of injury issues throughout his career, is the quickest of their options, which also include Jofra Archer, Josh Tongue, Brydon Carse and Gus Atkinson.<\/p>\n
Should Chris Woakes fail to recover from his shoulder injury or be omitted, Wood may also be the only frontline bowler in England’s squad who has played a Test in Australia. He took 17 wickets across four Tests on the 2021-22 tour, including nine in the fifth Test in Hobart.<\/p>\n
Durham have three County Championship matches left this season – against Essex from 8 September, at home to Worcestershire on 15 September and away to Yorkshire on 24 September.<\/p>\n
“I’ll try and play one or two of those,” Wood said.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been well looked after and very cautious.<\/p>\n
“I value it as they’ve got this end game where they want me to get to Australia.<\/p>\n
“But I said to [England coach Brendon McCullum] Baz McCullum I can’t just bowl to a net for four months, I’ll go insane. <\/p>\n
“There’s a bowling camp in Loughborough in a tent – getting acclimatised there ready for Perth – then I’ll go over to Perth early with a couple of bowlers. <\/p>\n
“We’ll arrive about a week early to prepare and get acclimatised.”<\/p>\n
The Ashes begins in Perth on 21 November.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wood’s importance to England bid to win the Ashes for the first time since 2015 cannot be overstated.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":101028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-101027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101027\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}